FLOATING
It is a very odd feeling. I have suddenly begun to float along untethered to anything. Last Tuesday I was locked into leaving today for a three month trip around India and Europe, everything concentrated on being ready for this trip. Everything had finally fallen in place, Todd’s passport had arrived and visas for Susie and me had arrived. Everything was laid out on my bed to be packed in my carry on case. I knew just what I could take since I had done this four times in the last year.
And then last Tuesday night I began to shiver and shake wildly, only for an hour, and the next night for two hours. I was starting to fly apart. For two days I knew I had the flu and wondered for how long, but on Thursday I was suddenly diagnosed with an enlarged prostate and had a urinary infection and was told I couldn’t fly. And then the antibiotic took affect and today when I was time to fly I felt perfectly all right, ready for an overnight flight, but instead of being driven to the airport I drove Todd and Susie to the airport and then drove home.
But by this time I didn’t know where I was. I was somehow just floating free, not anchored or tied to anything. Susie just called me as she sat waiting for the take off from Newark to Paris. I feel I am there beside her, but I’m not. I’m sitting here at the dining room table with its magenta table cloth where I always sit. But even though I am sitting solidly I feel as if I am floating. For a little while, I don’t know how long it will last, I have the feeling that I am simply floating through life and have been for a long time, maybe since birth. How did I find myself in Hartford, Connecticut at 73 Sherman Street beside the Hog River stealing tomatoes from Victory gardens? Certainly I had been floating then. Who else has done that? Why me? And that is after being carried home from the Landour Community Hospital in the Himalayas in my mother’s arms as she was carried in a dandi, two men holding a crossbar on their shoulders in front and two behind on steep mountain paths. How unlikely is that? Or sitting on my father’s shoulders on the Nitta Maru, a Japanese ocean liner, just before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. How did that happen? And searching for my most precious belt at about the age of 7, a belt that had two ends and two buckles and then finding it chopped up in a farm field by my Grandfather Hall’s mower. A completely chance event that could only happen in a dream.
I hadn’t realized that all along I was floating through chance events that made no sense at all, no pattern, no purpose, just floating through life. It took only being completely dislocated a couple of days in a row and being wildly shaken apart to completely shake me free and to make me realize that I was floating along even now, attached to nothing and completely without purpose or pattern. I suddenly realize that I have been floating along my whole life.
And of course it is not just me. Everyone around me who has a fixed role in life and is so solidly planted that they can surprise no one and seem to be almost immovable is suddenly up and floating, too. Before, the people around me were almost invisible but now they are floating along like clouds at sunset, pink and shining, but evanescent, so that you can see right through them as they eddy this way and that in the breeze of chance. How did anyone get here and where are we going as we float along?
In a while I will go to sleep and wake up solid again in the pitch black of morning, suddenly stuck right here in the incomprehensible present. I won’t believe that I and the rest of the world were floating along the evening before. I won’t be on a trip. I will be right here in Swannanoa, still not knowing why, but finding it to be all there is and I will slog through the day. But right now, for no good reason, I am floating, and I enjoy it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 