A Journey of a Lifetime

Such a strange thing it is to venture away from one's homeland.  Terrifying, maybe, but above all, it left you with a weird feeling of emptiness, of foreignness.  Perhaps, it was because suddenly, you had nothing to go off of, nothing to ground you.  Good thing for that too, because otherwise, we would never learn to fly.  That might have been the reason I packed the weathered, cracked leather jacket into the bottom of my suitcase on impulse that day.  The day I left England for the voyage of a lifetime.  Of course, there were other, more sensible belongings I threw in there hastily (toothbrush, parchment, ink, money, and clothing) before I stowed away on the ship to the once proclaimed 'New World', dreaming of New York City trading.  No books accompanied me, as they were too heavy, and too full of past stories, already told and read.  I was ready for a new one.  But regardless of all of the sensible things that did accompany me, it was the jacket I was most grateful for.  Not because New York was just frighteningly cold (though I tell you it was), but because it was the only thing that gave me the weight to stay grounded, the one piece I had left of the only family I've ever known.  My father had worn that jacket with the collar askew, the buttons half done, and the rims folded in strange places.  I wore it trimmed, neat, and securely, so different yet exactly the same. 

I paced down the busy cobble roads filled to the brim with people and automobiles, my arms wrapped around my torso, my head turned downward and tucked in my jacket to keep from the cold and falling snow.  "Hot dogs, hot dogs, get your hot dogs here for fifty cents!" called a man on the edge of the street, a line dragging out from his stand. 'A hot dog,' I marveled, 'such a curious thing to sell.'  Of course it had never occurred to me that the chubby bald man would be selling high cholesterol strips of meat wrapped in buns, as it was a strange name in any respect.  I had assumed it was a literal hot dog, so naturally I'd find it strange.  However, I did discover the true meaning of the term 'hot dog' when I inched forward to get a clearer look.  I was bewildered in all honesty, finding it quite absurd to name a food of all things 'hot dog'.  It was then that I began to understand the unique world of urban America. 

Later that night, after returning to my one room apartment on the shady side of 22nd Street, I settled in and wrote the strange happening down in a letter to Father.  I knew it would only end up on the stone we laid down last May, in the graveyard outside the local church in Holmes Chapel, England, but I couldn't stop myself from writing it anyway.  Thus came the onslaught of letters to Heaven.  I wrote to him of the two elderly women who I worked with in the bakery downtown, both redheaded and chubby, always cloaked in aprons and smelling of honey buns.  Margret May loved to laugh a lot, and smack my bum when I walked past her.  Jennet Dowel had a permanent scowl plastered on her face, and always scolded me when I burned the bread, but regardless, she always kissed me hello and goodbye. 

Jonny was a boy who road through the city on a bike, delivering the Sunday Newspaper, whistling off-tune melodies.  Despite being twelve years of age, he lived in a household with seven younger siblings, no dad, and a sick mother, yet still managed to smile through his many below-minimum-wage jobs.  Allie was the girl on the train who always had a book clasped under her arm, and polite, prim expressions gracing her endearing face, and James Fitzgerald was the tall, lengthy waiter who courted her as he served tea up and down the boxcars.

I wrote them all down.  All their lives, their apparel, their lies.  Each was a new story to tell, to send back home until I get the nerve to write my own.  I hope that my letters to nowhere find their mark.  I hope that by the time I send my story, my father has found his own stories to tell me when I meet him next.

I remember that day as well; the day my own story started. I was at the market, you see, looking at vanilla beans for the bakery, when I spotted young Louise for the first time. Her hair had been wild and untamed in messy curls around her head, with her ivory cloak tied closely to her neck. She had been arguing with a woman, twice her age (and twice her size), who seemed quite frazzled by the girl's public display of discordance. Maybe she was her mother, her tutor, her governess--I never got to find out. It didn't matter. It wasn't Louise herself that held my attention, I've realized. No, it was merely her words. Something she had screamed in the middle of the market with hands thrown in the air and not a care of who turned to stare. "You don't get to decide my life for me," she had said. "you don't get to choose which roads I turn on and what signs I follow." I suppose Louise's situation was probably nothing like mine, but regardless, it seemed so relatable, so unceasingly like my own life, that I returned to the market the next day at the same hour, in hopes to see her again.

Things seemed to follow that pattern for a while. I took the bus went to work. Allie would read and James would slap a black coffee in front of me. Margret and Jennet would pinch my cheeks and spank my rear. I burned the bread a few times. Jonny road past me with a wave and a smile when I needlessly walked to the market with nothing to buy. And Louise would not be there.

No, the next time I would see her, it would be mid December. The cobbles were frosted over, and the icicles hung like crystals from the shop windows. I had quit going to the market to find her, and spent most of my days huddled in the bakery after hours with my redheaded women that had soon become like family. We had a christmas tree set up in the back that they had me haul in a couple weeks earlier, decorated with cookie cutters and baking utensils. In response to the cold, we huddled around the open oven like most families huddled around a fireplace, and drank hot cocoa over the lightest of conversations. It was long past closing time and long into the night when the doorbell chimed.

Louise was alone, wrapped in a cloak too thin for the weather, her eyes wide and her teeth chattering violently as she hopped from one foot to the other in the doorway. A warm drink and a change of clothes later, Margret, Jennet, and I got a tale out of her--a tale about a rich father who wanted the best of her, and a mother who expected a successful daughter. The girl wasn't all too interested in marrying someone high and powerful and going into business to inherit the factory like everyone around her assumed she would do without question. The girl was an artist and a poet, who preferred creating images of oceans with waves that rolled onto of each other as far as the horizon would allow rather than stay in the jungle of concrete and count coppers for the family that always assumed. The girl wanted the ocean to wander amidst. The girl was no longer welcomed in her castle of a home.

When I went back to my apartment that evening, I wrote my last letter.

She never left the bakery that night, or the night that followed. She stayed. She stayed through Christmas and New Years, and much longer than that, until eventually, we both took our leave together. I remember her boisterous voice and her dramatically elevated eyebrow as she placed her hand on my shoulder saying "I surely hope that you don't mean to remain here forever." I still remember her eyes lighting up when she saw the sea spreading in every direction for the first time, too far from the harbor to feel the comforts of land.

We're both well underway in writing our own story now.