Lingering on the Threshold

Sometimes, when I’m traveling, I am overcome with this sweet melancholy. I feel a faint welling of tears, so deep behind my eyes that they never fill. It’s not sadness, and it has no particular reason or focus. But just for a moment, I feel as if everything that ever happened in my life, and everything that ever will happen, are concentrated in the present, and I’m more an observer than a participant. I catch a glimpse of myself in the laptop screen or the airplane window, and for a second I don’t recognize the 54-year old woman I’ve become. My face doesn’t match the 20-year-old feminist full of wise-ass hope, the newly married 30-year-old activist/singer, the 40-year old mother of a first-grader/priest/therapist, or the octogenarian grandmother professor I imagine myself someday to be. All the loves of my life past, present and future circle around my head like butterflies artfully swarming a Disney princess.

I’ve always loved these liminal moments traveling from one place to another. As a child I loved the excitement of packing the big robin’s egg blue car with its enormous fenders, and heading out to the highway. In my memory, the road to New Hampshire is always sunlit, the asphalt light greenish-gray and shimmering in the late summer heat, and the woods along the side of the road are lush and mysterious. There is always a wide horizon visible through the big windshield, and the sky is always bright blue. I’m sure I must have whined as all children do on long car rides, “Are we there yet?” and “I need to go’t’the bathroom!,” but what sticks in my memory is not the confinement and boredom. But the sense of being in a space neither here nor there—where what comes next is all possibility, and not yet locked in to a certain this or that.

In college, I found my liminal spaces on the 4-hour bus ride from Boston to New York, where my best friend had already begun the hardscrabble life of an aspiring opera singer. I looked forward to sharing confidences in her tiny studio apartment on West 71st Street, eating at Fulton’s Café across the street (now sadly replaced by a fast food restaurant), and discovering all the wonders of New York as a brand new adult trying on her brand new sophistication. But the bus ride was a special time in its own right. (As a college music major I couldn’t afford Amtrak.) Jiggling along the highway in the dark, sharing space with an assortment of humanity and our raggedy luggage, I always sank into a philosophical mood. I pulled out one of the dog-eared spiral-bound notebooks that served as my journals in those days, and took a long, serious, and romantic survey of my life. As the bus put distance between me and my brownstone dorm room, I analyzed my relationships, diagnosed myself and all my friends and relations, plotted my artistic career, bemoaned a variety of things, and indulged in sweet fantasies about my dramatic and glorious future. By the time I reached Port Authority, I was ready to assume the world-weary, glamorous, hardened slouch I always affected to meet (and mimic) my gorgeous friend. I wore black, and identified with tragic or waiflike beauties of the past—Garbo, Piaf, Dietrich, Anaïs Nin.

As I got older, and was claimed by adult relationships and responsibilities, travel became a more serious matter. Flying was often related to career advancement, and my liminal time was swallowed up by reviewing a paper or grant proposal (when I was not preoccupied just with keeping my fear of flying at bay – but that’s the subject for another blog!) There were family visits, of course, and occasional vacations. But the travel itself became something to survive, or at least to get through, rather than a gift of time and contemplation.

One trip that stands out, though, is the plane ride from San Francisco to San Salvador during the horrific mid-1980’s in Central America. My husband and I were not yet married – or even romantically involved. I had recruited him on this trip, both for his fluent Spanish and his natural leadership gifts, to join a small group of church members who had pledged to accompany a Salvadoran pastor targeted by the death squads for his work with the poor in the countryside. The plane, owned and operated by the Salvadoran airline TACA (lovingly dubbed “take a chance airline”), had an unfortunate habit of yawing rhythmically from side to side because its engines, as my pilot husband informed me, were “out of synch.” “Is that OK!?” I asked him. “Yeah, sure,” he said, nonchalantly – but I noticed his jaw kept clenching as he peered out the window. I remember looking straight ahead down the tunnel of the center aisle, which was dark in the nighttime flight, and thinking we were all hurtling to our doom. Not from the flight itself, I fervently hoped (how humiliating and mundane to be on a serious mission, and not even get there because of some ordinary plane crash!) We were all very quiet, not knowing exactly what we would be facing once we landed, but knowing that we had it ever so much easier than the faithful people we were going to visit and hopefully shield with nothing more solid than our U.S. passports.

My habitual preoccupation with my little life was muted on this flight by the enormity of what we had undertaken. We felt like mice getting ready to stand up and roar at a monster—which was in many ways the truth of the situation. Our only security was the paradoxical and angering knowledge that the escuadrones de muerte were funded by our own government, and our deaths would put a crimp in the operations of the CIA-supported Salvadoran paramilitary. Whether we lived or died, we would throw a spanner in the works. If enough mice confronted the monster, and went back to the U.S. to tell about what we learned, the war might even end. To this day, I believe it was one of the most foolhardy, and important, things I have ever done.

Salvadoran pilots, mostly military-trained, don’t tend to take off and land according to the niceties of American flight. Sharp ascents and descents are the norm—especially over the volcanic mountains that ring Central American countries. As the plane jumped and then lurched into what felt like a rocky free fall toward the capital, I fairly leaped onto my future husband’s chest. “Calm down, Coop,” he remembers saying to himself, “She’s just freaked out by the turbulence.” True – but before the month was over, we had gotten to know each other in a deep way that maybe only happens in an extreme situation like that war zone. We sat on a bench under palm trees one evening after saying Night Prayers with our little group. We held hands to the sound of shelling just on the outskirts of the city, and the shrill whistles of the paramilitary thugs who extorted payments for “protection” from the local neighbors. I loved him for his courage and calm, and he loved me for my passion and loyalty to the cause and the people. The leap I took into his arms on the plane turned out to be a leap for life!

Almost 2 ½ decades later, my travel has become much more routine. But I have reclaimed the liminal space of being on that Greyhound bus to New York, or even the car ride to North Conway,NH. I’ve become a mother, a settled professional, and even a brand new grandmother. My fantasies of the future no longer center around the glare of bright lights, although I have not completely given up performing (either on stage or in a lecture hall). My fantasies are quieter now, but no less warmly lit. I still survey my life and relationships sometimes, especially on a longer trip, but by now I imagine I have at least as much life behind me as in front of me, and the future holds more predictable scenarios. Maybe that’s why there is the slightest film of tears at the back of my nose. There are losses to be mourned—deaths of beloved people, relationships that have petered out or just ended due to changing circumstances and interests, jobs finished and cities left behind, and even opportunities not chosen. But the melancholy is sweet, too, because the present is full of joy, and the future holds both further loss and further promise. I am certainly not too old for surprises. As my friend Sharline often says, the Spirit often comes to us by way of surprises. What are today’s surprises, and what gifts do they offer?