Coming Full Circle

By Nancy Philippi

A woman approaching 60 journeys alone around the world, with only a backpack and an open-ended ticket, to find out whether she can revitalize her life. Her husbands suicide 17 years earlier left her with three children to raise, mountains of pain and guilt to overcome, and a protective shell around her feelings and her dreams. With her children now grown and her ailing mother recently deceased, she decides its now or never to discover whether her once-vibrant sense of wonder and adventure can be reignited. But she fears that the years may have destroyed what she remembers as her inner self and that meaning in life, much less happiness, is no longer available to her.
Traveling westward around the globe, she slowly discovers her old zest for life, but not without a full complement of accompanying pain. During her early weeks in Hong Kong and a bitter- sweet experience in mainland China, she begins to shed the image of tourist and to view herself as a true journeyer, but loneliness consumes her and she considers giving up and settling for whatever drab fate may await her back home. In freewheeling Thailand, however, she senses the beginnings of a breakthrough during an opium-smoking elephant riding trek through the Golden Triangle.

Struggling up and down the disarray of the Malaysian peninsula, into the jungles of Borneo, through a terrifying bus trip across Sumatra, and finally collapsing in sterile Singapore, she confronts demons from her past. Her old self gets severed battered and as it disintegrates, she wonders if by throwing over her old life, she hasnt destroyed the best that she could hope for. But then two magical weeks in Sri Lanka under the tutelage of a remarkable guide provide a healing time, and during a month in India she makes strong new connections with the people around her. The world that includes the Ramadan of new Muslim friends, a camel trip, the Rajasthan desert culture, vestiges of the Mongul civilization, the forces that wreaked havoc at Ayodhya and the rough-and-tumble street life of New Delhi becomes her home.
Daily confrontations with the unknowns of the outer world evoke possibilities for a revived inner life, and as she journeys along less traveled paths she peels off the crusty coverings of past personas and discovers new, more honest ways to be and live. She discovers ways and relationships that work best for her and by testing her limits learns about both the opportunities and constraints that will define the last one third of her life. As routine and repetition disappear, time slows down and she recaptures her long-lost excitement at the promise of each day. Out of the pain of loneliness she discovers the pleasures of solitude.
Toward the end of her journey, two weeks in Greece with her high school sweetheart help her understand that intimate relationships may be less important to her chosen way of life than staying open to the infinite kaleidoscope of life. By the end of the trip she has emerged from the memories, fantasies, and miseries of the past into the present, ready for the future. She is not who she had hoped she would become, but she is who she is. She has learned to be, in the words of Shiva Naipaul, more properly real.
This story of one womans search for personal authenticity on a trip around the world is relevant to anyone of any age who is interested in becoming a traveler, rather than a tourist, on lifes journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493179046

Nancy Philippi

The Author is living outside Chicago with her goats.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. The Little Yellow Chair

Chapter 2. Hong Kong Traveler

Chapter 3. China Tourist

Chapter 4. Opium Man

Chapter 5. Looking For Malaysia

Chapter 6. Longhouse On The Lemanak

Chapter 7. Bus To Bukittinggi

Chapter 8. In The Down South With Ian

Chapter 9. The Streets Of New Delhi

Chapter 10. From Ayodhya To The Taj

Chapter 11. Tak And The Beautiful Vishnois Ladies

Chapter 12. Goats In The Rajasthan Desert

Chapter 13. In The Peloponnese With Ralph

Chapter 14. Arles

TO STEPHANIE, KATIE, GABRIELLE,

MATTHEW, MARISSA, JOHN, DYLAN, PAIGE,

IAN AND JOELLE, WHO HAVE HELPED ME

BECOME PROPERLY REAL

CHAPTER ONE

THE LITTLE YELLOW CHAIR

A trip is no longer what a trip once was, a farewell taking, death to one life, birth to another. Today a trip is see you later, don’t wait up, the 7 AM shuttle out, back home to sleep. Even crossing the Atlantic had become old hat to me—another business trip to France, ho hum.

This trip was different.

The silver Volvo that pulled up to the O’Hare Airport departure curb had been mine yesterday, was today a gift to my daughter Paula who sat behind the wheel, the bud of my first grandchild swelling inside her womb. I’d jettisoned it all—the car, the house, the business. Saying goodbye to such things was easy; to people, more difficult.

I dragged my backpack from the car.

Don’t have the baby until I get back.

Mom, be careful.

A careful person, I was still not careful enough for a child who lost her other parent in a sudden fearful way.

I’ll call you from Hong Kong.

Sometimes our hearts are too full to say the things we feel, and mine was then. If I had not already told her how much I ached for loving her, for her pregnancy and for not being there for every day of it, now was too late. My feet bypassed my heart and walked into the terminal, out of the world as I had known it for 57 years.

At the counter I looked back. The car was gone. I was alone. I had a love/hate thing about being alone.

There was a little armless rocking chair in a dim corner of the dining room, in the New England farmhouse where I began my life. My mother had painted the wood bright yellow and made a cushion for the seat, a flat flowering print affair tied into place with hand stitched strips of cloth. It was hard and angular but it was mine, the place I read and wrote and dreamed, a quiet cul de sac away from the traffic patterns of my uncle and grandfather who, with my widowed mother, shared the house. My father had died so early in my life that I only knew him through their memories.

Get some fresh air. Don’t mope, Mother would say and so, good daughter that I was, I’d go out into the hot fields where the tall grass scratched my bare legs and insects stung. But often Mother would busy herself with other things and back I’d sneak, to plan a life of greatness, glory and adventure. Among my future feats of derring do I’d marry Fred Astaire, solve crimes and mysteries and write great books. All things are possible when you are under ten. I’d leap from my bed on summer mornings, excited by the promise of the day, exploding with Oh What a Beautiful Morning before my feet touched the ground. Beautiful mornings would flow seamlessly into a beautiful life.

I had some setbacks along the way. When I was ten my uncle’s life oozed out into the mud beneath the tractor that toppled onto him. The farm—the place I’d sunk my taproot strong and deep—was sold, and my grandfather packed away to other daughters’ homes where he withered and died. Mother and I moved from place to place, living in other people’s houses or single rooms as she struggled to support us both. We both worked hard—I at my studies, she at office jobs—until I was sent to a boarding school where scholarships made living cheaper than at home. There things improved, I fell in love, found God and knew, again, that life was good. I loved myself, the way I was, the person I would be.

Things once again went wrong. The boy I loved deserted me and I deserted God. I went, for lack of funds, to a pedestrian college that took itself too seriously and which I left, searching for a better, bigger world. I found that world but was not big enough myself to handle it. I set the dreams aside and married and for 17 years I was a wife with babies, mortgages and moving vans, dreams tucked away in secret cubby holes.

Then came the nightmare. My husband killed himself and left me my life’s assignment——to help our three children survive his devastating act. Near paralyzed by the flip flop of my life, the only thing that drove me was those kids. To be their mother was my life and for 17 more years that was enough. But now, at 57, I found myself alone, a person that had no zest for living, and I saw big trouble looming up ahead. With as much as 30 more years to live—if I were to track my mother’s hearty genes—I saw no reason to get out of bed, much less to leap with joy. Unless I found new promises for my days, their passage would be grim. I thought back to the excitements in that little yellow chair and wondered if any remnants had survived.

Of all the dreams I’d let slip away during those dreary years since Peter died, I’d kept one alive. Presiding over the Zurich Airport lounge was the Departure Board, with a list of destinations that read like an atlas of the world. I sometimes sat below it, waiting for a plane to take me home to sell the wines that I had bought in Burgundy and Piedmont, for my importing business, the way I made my living after Peter died. Watching the blinking green lights, I’d imagine picking a destination—someplace unknown to me, like Qatar, Istanbul or Rabat, walking to the gate, getting on the plane and flying off. No plans, no reservations, only surprises at the other end. This fantasy was, for me, adventure, freedom, and something more. When I got off the plane, I’d be in a new and different world, the one I’d foreseen when I was young, where life was beautiful.

I couldn’t test that fantasy when the children, the business, and my aging mother anxiously waited, needing me at home. But now that there was nothing I had to be for anyone else—the children grown, my mother dead two years—I could act it out and so I would. I bought an open-ended ticket that would let me wander westward, clear around the globe, hoping that when I’d come full circle I’d have found the person that was me, if such a person had survived the playacting I’d done.

I had played good daughter to a mother whose life was devoted to piloting me through mine. I made my bed and did my chores, finished my homework and sat quietly while grown ups talked, intent on pleasing her, not me. I went to her choice of colleges, not mine; turned down suitors of whom she disapproved and married the man whom she had steered me toward. As I grew up the nurturing tables turned, as she laid her tears and sorrows at my feet and, after she remarried when I was in college, I was the well into which she poured the bitterness that marriage brought her. It had its price, this role, and I learned too late the good friend my stepfather might have been to me.

I worked as hard and as much against the grain in my roles as wife and mother, full time jobs less in the doing than the being. We moved from the mid west to California, then to the eastern seaboard, and finally into dust bowl country before we ended up in the mid west again, each move driven by Peter’s rocketing career. We had a deal, Peter and I, that the one with something big to do would always be supported by the other. This was his time, not mine, although my cubbyholes grew overstuffed with notions of what would one day be. My escapes into books and dreamy solitude consoled me with the notion that I was something more than homemaker. Alone, when I could find it, was still my friend.

But my husband’s violent final act turned solitude into a frightening place, full of horror and guilt, and in the 17 years since he had died I had rarely ventured there. Mother, daughter, wage earner, entrepreneur, householder described not only what I did but also what I was. Now things had changed and the curtain was going down on what had been the business of my middle years. The roles that had defined me were defunct. To dig beneath those layers for that earlier me was risky stuff in case, neglected and disguised for all those years, it was not there.

Just before Peter’s death I’d dyed my hair to cover a touch of grey and when, years later, I went natural again, I found that all the brown was gone. It was my fear, stepping off into the unknown of this trip, that the essence of my being, my core, was gone as well and as I broke free from the fuss and blather of my life, there would be nothing left inside to find.

The airline clerk thumbed through the pages of my ticket, then thumbed again.

No reservations?

"Only to Hong Kong. It’s a round-the-world ticket and after the first leg I pick the times and places as I go, always headed west."

It sounds like fun.

Fun? My melancholy friend Hugh once claimed that urinating was the only fun he knew and although I didn’t share this private pleasure, I understood. Fun is a physical thing—an up tempo burst of speed, flash of fear, shot of adrenaline or alcohol. It even makes one laugh out loud. I did not take this trip in search of fun.

The first leg was across the lifeless geometric landscape of the central plains—squared off fields and circular irrigation patterns outlined by a dusting of late November snow. Leaving and loss were heavy on my mind. In Salt Lake City, with two hours before the next plane, I took a coffee to the cafeteria booth where, three years before, I had played a noisy game of pinochle with the children, having skied the Wasatch Mountains at Christmas. My son John had ridden the baggage belt, throwing satchels to his sisters as horrified passengers looked on and Debbie, a sturdy gymnast, had dumped him in a snowbank before we took the minibus up the mountain. Our driver told stories of avalanches.

It was around this curve the big one hit, covering the van to the roof. They didn’t shovel us out ’till morning.

We didn’t quite believe him but his story resonated in the next morning’s muffled pre-dawn boom of avalanche guns. The thought of drowning in a rush of snow kept our adrenaline levels high. Skiing had been my way to cope with Christmas after Peter’s death. His energy had driven the holiday—so many gifts, so big a tree, a dash to the stores on Christmas Eve for one more thing, curled on the couch with late night martinis in the glow of multicolored lights. Peter made everything a game, loved doing things and did them well. More playmate than soul mate, he was good at having fun.

Skiing was as close to fun as I could muster on my own. The first year I dragged the children to a ski hill north of Chicago, Wilmot, forcing them downwards in groin-splitting snowplows. The next year we went higher and faster, in stem turns at Alpine Valley. The third, I drove the long gray road to Cliff’s Ridge, at the base of Lake Superior, where John perfected schussing, the girls developed grace and I took one whopper fall, belly-sliding a steep and icy slope, reminding my adrenaline-bloated brain of my mortality. By the time they reached college and I was making enough money to afford such luxuries, they were ready for the west, for Aspen, Vail, Steamboat, Snowbird and Park City. John shot past us in whooping spread eagle leaps off every bump. Where I had once coaxed Debbie and Paula onto intermediate trails, now I lagged behind on black diamond chutes. I was no longer leader of the pack.

Among all the memories that cafeteria booth aroused, a single one stood out—as we played cards my ears had steeled themselves for the ringing of my wristwatch alarm that would send Debbie down the concourse for her departure westward. The rest of us were traveling east on a later plane. Her move to Los Angeles, the first time one of my children had left home, had ripped away a piece of me, leaving a bloody wound. Her presence on this ski vacation had been so comforting that I kept the alarm set for days, to trigger sweet remembrance of being with her, although it forced me to re-live the pain of separation each time it beeped, bellwether of more pains to come as one by one they ventured out onto their own, college, jobs, and mates. The girls were married and John was engaged.

Now it was me who was leaving, making the separation complete. My children spent Christmases elsewhere and skied with people their own age, as well they should. Not that they’d left my life, nor I theirs, but nothing was the same. I’d handled my old role well enough but was not so sure about the new one. How, for example, would I spend Christmases in years to come? Propped up like a holiday decoration, in an armchair in someone else’s living room, a stuffed Christmas Granny for the kiddies to enjoy? Not on your life!

Good lord, Christmas was only three weeks away. How would I make it through!

I dozed during the next flight, to Anchorage.

Are we having dinner tonight?

A stewardess hovered over me and I woke confused and dizzy, in mortal fear of where I was. It was a repeat of an earlier time when, flying with three-month-old Paula, terror rendered me semi-conscious and other people had to care for my baby. It had been reality that knocked me out, a clear-as-a-bell awareness that my padded seat was suspended precariously in space, that my feet rested gingerly on a carpeted piece of tin that barely kept me from free falling 30,000 feet, and that with a gentle tip of wings, a teeny tilt of nose, this tinseled living room could whoosh toward the earth tossing our bodies helter-skelter into the sky and separating me from my baby for eternity. Now again, thirty years later, my gut informed me—accurately—that I was hurtling through the stratosphere in a metal tube, six miles above the ground. It was the harsh intrusion of fact into fiction, not the other way around. The reality of flying had broken through the artifices designed to calm my nerves—music, movies, food—and I was paralyzed.

We depend on numbing devices to cope with terrifying things. The big terrors, such as eternity, infinity, come well disguised. Otherwise we’d faint while walking to the mailbox during our 170 mile per second dash through icy black space. We lift our eyes to the roof of the universe and trace Orion and the Big Dipper, denying our new found 20th century knowledge of our globular home’s hurtle into nothingness. We go about our daily lives with our backs turned to that great tidal wave that will eventually overtake us, oblivious to the small personal calamities that can and will occur. Deadening of sensation had served me well in the long grey aftermath of Peter’s death.

Flying more but still uncomfortably, ten years after that first sky trauma, I tackled it head on, learning to pilot those bouncy little planes that keep you ever mindful of what you’re in and where you are. Although my first solo was the fourth most thrilling experience of my life—birthings were first—the greatest pleasure came when I was safely on the ground, where the relief of still being alive dissolved me in ecstacy. But learning to fly had worked its magic. If I could keep those rinky dink Cessnas in the air the big guys, with all their training, confidence and charm, could surely keep their hi tech Boeing hunks of steel afloat. Except during landings, I flew with nonchalance.

It had been Peter’s dream to fly, not mine, but lessons fitted my schedule better than his and so it was me at the controls of the single engine Cessna, Peter peering out the window, map in his lap, three children stuffed into the back seat, when we first went up together. Flying was one of the many doors his enthusiasms opened up for me.

Down there, a farmer’s private strip! he cried, urging me to do a touch and go—quick landing and take off—and so I did, bouncing down the grassy lane, learning later that farmers discouraged such trespassing with shotguns. Peter was fearless, indifferent to the possibility of death, while I traveled white-knuckled through life, waging pitched battle with my own mortality. If I couldn’t muster up enough life-saving anaesthesia to do the job, I solved problems by tackling them head on. Ergo, this trip.

The stewardess flipped the latch and dropped the tray. The moment had passed, I was sane—or perhaps insane—again. The drinks cart arrived.

Beaujolais, please.

I filled the glass too full and dark red liquid sloshed onto my tan cotton jacket. I dabbed at it with a dampened crumbling napkin. I’d never get it out, and this my only proper outfit. Not out of the country yet and grunge had caught up with me.

Expected as a child to be something that my insides whispered I was not, my sense of being odd man out took different forms. One of them was in the grunge that came from the old farmhouse, whose cracks exuded residues of age and whose chicken coop floors were caked with rancid excrement. Our sinks were grey while others sparkled white, and while we had indoor plumbing, my grandfather sometimes snuck off to the outhouse in the back. My mother cooked at a black iron wood stove, not an electric range, and I attached skis to my feet with canning rubbers, not metal springs and clamps. These differences with other children’s lives I labeled grunge, but it covered a host of more important things, above all being fatherless. I lived not with a father but with Uncle Dwin and, instead of playing with brothers and sisters after school, I played cards with my Gramp. My friends had fathers, every one, and siblings too, and at Sunday picnics I longed for someone of my own within the group of men that gathered to fish and smoke and talk. With time and adulthood I disdained these deficits, yet here was grunge, in the red smear on my jacket, bubbling up from the murky depths of an inner me that I would prefer to leave unmined. I would have no control, apparently, over what old baggage I’d be dragging along as I left the world in which I had learned to feel safe.

I ran a mental checklist of the clothes inside my pack. Chosen carefully for travel close to the equator, each piece was hand-washable and lightweight. One well-worn Dacron sweater, a Michigan State windbreaker, two pairs of cotton slacks and a single skirt. No jeans—too bulky and slow to dry. Tank, tee, turtle-necked and long-sleeved shirts to layer up, if cold, along with silk ski underwear to slip beneath my slacks. Tiny tubes and bottles of toiletries would be replenished as they ran out——two cups of liquid weigh a pound. Two pairs of shoes took more than their share of space in the combination backpack and suitcase, which could be carried by its handle or, with straps hooked up, over my shoulders. It would allow me to go where and when I wanted, but I dreaded having to hoist it on my back. It would look foolish on a woman of my age, another way of being odd man out.

My other piece of luggage, the day pack at my feet, held items separated into plastic bags. One contained a state-of-the-art camera and a dozen cartridges of film with speeds that ranged from 25 to 1000. My travel technology bag held a five-function TR14EE translator, pocket flashlight, compass and alarm clock. There was the money bag, a mix of cash and travelers checks, an ATM card, one credit card that promised worldwide contact with AT&T and my passport. In a general purpose bag I carried pencil sharpener, Swiss army knife, magnifying glass, extra reading glasses and sewing kit. Lipstick, hairbrush, deodorant and lotion were the only cosmetics. Loose items included pencils, journal, maps, sections removed from travel books and two paperback novels. Putting the packs together had been great fun, the paring down of life’s stuff and nonsense to those bare essentials I could neatly carry on my back.

One open pack of Virginia Slims was on top. I loved to smoke. Peter and I had stopped when the children came—easy to do once he had covered the walls with photos of diseased lungs. But before they had removed his body from the carbon-monoxide filled garage as I sat huddled, trembling in the next room, I reached for the cigarette that, in the deep calming inhale, kept at bay the madness that hovered close at hand. I chain smoked my way through the nightmare days and weeks and months that followed. But, as I slowly got back on my feet and began to throw away external crutches, I discarded cigarettes.

Six years after Peter’s death, on the evening when I stepped from the airport taxi into the kitchen where my mother sat alone, hours after my step father’s fatal heart attack, only the glow of her cigarette lit the darkness. I reached for her hand and then her cigarettes. Smoking together we shared the pain and it felt like betrayal when I finally quit and left her to smoke alone, although in every other sense I stayed close by. Ten years later, when she died the piecemeal way that tears apart the ones who love them, I dulled my grief and rage with cigarettes. That was two years ago and I intended on this trip to quit—again.

I pulled my journal from my pack to record the $1.50 for my Salt Lake City coffee. If I could hold to $50 a day, I could stay under $10,000 for five months, including airplane ticket. It came from savings. With my business closed, my only income was rent from my house, enough to keep up insurance payments.

This trip was the excuse for closing down Philippi Imports, importer and distributor of French and Italian fine wines, the latest way I had made my living. I’d skimmed in and out of a lot of jobs since early adulthood, moving about the country to follow Peter’s work, until the day when, fired abruptly from his job, he’d had to move with me. It was the first time the world had turned against him and he didn’t take it well. His outward self stiffened, his pleasures succumbed to paranoias, he kept a carton of cigarettes hidden in his car, laced the jug of red wine under his desk with brandy and went into full decline.

I had been in politics then, part of the Illinois governor’s team, a lively, slapdash way to earn a living, demanding and precarious work which, in the aftermath of the suicide, I scarcely had the energy to endure. But as a pilot I had used the artificial horizon on the control panel to maneuver through haze, as a mother, it was my three pre-teen aged children who kept me on course, threading through and past the horror. Without them, I probably would have crashed.

I built a wall to keep my miseries from oozing out but my innards withered and decayed as my outside shell held fast. Work hard, make money, raise the children, take care of mother—those were my roles, which I played well enough. When the governor, Dan Walker, lost the election I took a job on Jimmy Carter’s team in the federal EPA and when the president lost, I joined Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne’s personal staff. By the time she lost to Harold Washington it was clear that politics was no life for an adult, and I started the wine importing business that Peter would have loved far more than did I.

Wine was a hobby we had shared, not drinking less gin, only more wine. In my early days of ammonia-scented diaper-serviced motherhood there was one glorious carefree night each month. I’d escape the days of shopping, cleaning and the sole companionship of toddlers when Peter was on his frequent business trips, with the meeting of our wine tasting club. In pink Peter Max stockings, a swirly purple paisley dress, my hair swept high, I’d take the arm of handsome Peter in his Nehru jacket to join four other couples for whom the 60’s were a struggle to gain a foothold in the fast moving adult world. We sucked up the wines that Frank Schoonmaker told us to, accompanied by glorious cream and butter dishes from Julia Child and danced into the night to I Want to Hold Your Hand. No matter that we woke next morning to a baby’s pre-dawn squalls, with hangovers. Peter won most blind tastings and as with all his hobbies—breeding tropical fish, making wine, scuba diving—he did it with gusto. Exhaustive tasting notes were part of his legacy.

I readied for my move into the wine business while working for Jane Byrne, getting an MBA at night, as if that could tell me how to sell a wine. The new kid on the wine importing block and a woman in a man’s world to boot, it was a slow and agonizing struggle up from $30,000 in gross sales the first year to $1 million in the last. I was never, at heart, a buyer and a seller of wines, I was only keeping poverty and despair at bay in the hard working, sunrise to sunset New England farmer’s way.

At first I’d loved the European buying trips but even they got tedious toward the end. The selling was much worse, requiring long hours in the car, grinding down those buyers who cared only about price and brushed off my lovely little proprietor estates, of which I could tell you as much about the men and women that made them as about the wines themselves. Humoring others who said they wanted quality but had no idea what it was, was even worse. The only thing I genuinely enjoyed was hunching over the accounting program at the computer late at night, untying some double entry Gordian knot. Small entrepreneurship was, as flying once had been, just one more thing at which to try my hand, a way to earn a living or pass the time, to put off the things I’d dreamed about back in that little yellow chair. Now, when my children’s adulthood and mother’s death had released me from the obligation to satisfy other peoples needs, I closed it down. Importing wine had been a way to make a living but it was not, for me, a life.

Nor had the city house I lived in been a home. Set in a narrow block of concrete stretching from the street to the alley in the back, it was not the world I was born into, my grandfather’s farm, flooded with the sound of