ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT
Yesterday Montevideo was a dream, but today I am reminded that it is because Asheville was getting to be so real that I hopped on the plane and landed by accident in Montevideo. Asheville, four months after India, the Baltic States, and Paris, France, Winsen, Germany and Haarlem, Netherlands was getting to be too real. Asheville for someone from Montevideo was still a dream but Asheville for someone who had lived all their life there was beginning to close in and feel as if I was being encased in concrete.
I left my down jacket on the plane. My son sent me a second down jacket (Amazon Basics, $23) by Fed Ex. It would get here by Thursday. It didn’t. I stayed in all day Thursday waiting, and Friday. Monday a Fed Ex guy showed up with five official sheets of paper in Spanish. I was to call a number and my jacket would be released from Uruguayan customs and delivered. I called the number. Someone answered in Spanish and when I said that I only spoke Spanish they hung up. I didn’t know what to do but finally found the address of a Fed Ex office not far away. I walked there and the door was locked with no one inside that I could see. I read the hours carefully. They were said to be open. I waited some more. Finally a man appeared from behind a computer at a desk and let me in. The information I had been told was wrong. I would have to go to the airport. The man spoke perfect English but was vague about the bus to the airport or where it started from. I just needed to walk down to the river and turn right and there, somewhere, would be a bus station. But it was 3 p.m. and the customs office at the airport closed at 4. I was too late for today.
But my response to this long saga wasn’t frustration but delight. I had no idea what was going on in my week long wait for my jacket. I couldn’t speak the language, I didn’t know how anything worked, I might in Kafkaesque fashion spend weeks searching for my jacket if it really was here at all. Perfect. I was clueless and floating free in Montevideo where everything was surreal and unreal. This was my reason for coming to Montevideo with no knowledge of Uruguay at all. I was here to flounder around and float free. I thought of the second line of the children’s song.
Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily. Life is but a dream.
The problem with Asheville, the reason I needed to escape was that I was slowly being encased in concrete and was becoming immovable. Everything in Asheville is real, everything in Asheville is fixed, everything is solid. I can’t float in Asheville because Asheville is so real: the strip malls all over the city, the franchise big box stores and shiny McDonalds and Taco Bell which make every American city look the same, the same cliches about the weather or politics or everything which I understand perfectly, the American dream which mummifies me.
Again, I know this is in my head and not in the heads of my fellow Americans, all of whom are happy that Asheville, their familiar home, is so real. It is my problem. I offered a free room in Montevideo to all my friends in Asheville. No one took me up on a free month in Montevideo. When I show up again in two weeks none of them will even notice that I have been gone. And if I try to explain how Asheville is real and Montevideo is a dream their eyes will glaze over and they will think I am nuts.
But today I will keep rowing my boat as I continue the endless search for my jacket. Maybe I’ll find it, maybe I’ll need to pay a huge customs fee for a paint splattered $23 jacket, maybe I’ll be sent off to another office. I don’t care really what happens as I float along in Montevideo.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 