Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a better word than the gender-neutral and stodgily unsexy
companion
, or the literal yet
somehow aggrandizing
lover
, even though it carries a suggestion of impermanence.
We'll see about the permanence—for once, I have hopes—but we can't do anything
about that right now. We're just getting started, and Jan isn't quite divorced yet. This
bothers her college-age kids a little bit—funny how the generations determine what is
seemly—and, to my surprise, a few of her female friends, too.
Anyway, Jan has been living in Paris for a couple of years now, and she wasn't my
girlfriend
until
we went on the cycling trip; I'll tell you more about that later, maybe,
but the point is by now she's used to seeing the U.S. in general and New York and the life
she lived there in particular from a distant perspective. She thought it was funny how
goggle-eyed I was about the very fact of being in France, even though it wasn't my first,
or even second or third, visit there.
“Traveling abroad,” I said to her, in what became a running joke. “How come nobody
ever thought of this before?”
But the moment I landed in Paris, I felt my worldview expand to what I like to
think of as its natural state—the one where I'm not wearing self-imposed blinders—as
if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out that I was looking through
the wrong end of the binoculars. It was a powerful feeling of release; I'd been unaware of
the box I'd been living in, its walls the circumscribing routine of existence for a single,
middle-aged man in Manhattan. I'd worn ruts in the sidewalk from my apartment to the
gym and to the office and to the Knickerbocker, the local bar that feels, at this point, a
lot like my living room.
It was only by escaping to a different environment that I understood how easily our
habits take control of us and how thoroughly mine had. You settle into a life where fa-
miliarity is everything, and yikes! Before you know it, you haven't been to a museum in
a year and a half, you're treading the same aisles in the same supermarket twice a week,
you can't remember the last time you made a friend, you're not trying any new restaur-
ants (or even eating lunch anywhere but the company cafeteria), and you find yourself
watching soporific reruns of favorite television shows—some episode of the
Law & Order
franchise seems to be on at any given moment of the day—merely to pass the time. I
often feel lately as though I'm not learning anything anymore, that I can't, nothing that
sticks in my memory, anyway. What I glean in a day's work is forgotten the following
morning, what I knew last week is what I know today, what I knew six months ago is
what I knew last week, what I'll know tomorrow is—well, you get it. For example, I
had a great time in Paris and Provence, where I marveled at the medieval hill towns, Ro-
man ruins, and thrilling landscapes mixing the domesticity of vineyards and olive groves
with the natural drama of stony cliffs and fields smeared luridly with orange-red poppies
