The down and unlocked tray
table held my favorite indulgences: whiskey
on ice, a cup of coffee, Jared Diamond’s book, and an unlit cigar that I was
chewing when the flight attendant wasn’t looking. Anne napped with her head on my shoulder as
our airplane bored through the night clouds.
The boisterous soldiers ahead of us had quieted down as I sipped
excellent beverages and read about bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. The vacation was off to a great start.
She woke up
as we started our descent, which was a good thing because (a) I couldn’t carry
Anne through the San Juan airport along with both of our backpacks, and (b)
Anne was the only one in our party of two who knew where we were going in San
Juan. So when we got out of the airport
at about 11:30 pm and boarded a taxi, Anne told the driver where to go while I
mused aloud about other means of transportation such as riding donkeys and
transcontinental, transoceanic passenger trains.
I can’t say
for sure whether it was my contributions that got us there, but we eventually reached our
accommodations at “Caleta 64” in Old San Juan.
Anne had found the place on “Air B&B” and the place was great—an
apartment that we had to ourselves with a mini-courtyard, brick floors, white
walls, and tall ceilings. Tropical
trees, vines, and epiphytes grew in the courtyard, green against the white
walls as they held leaves out to the humid night air. We could hear what sounded like tropical
birds from the city outside.
Now I’m
sitting at our breakfast table with a morning cup of coffee, looking out into
the courtyard as Anne sleeps. She has
worked herself into the ground over the past week and she needs the rest. My last week hasn’t been as rough but over
the past two months I’ve essentially done the same thing. There’s a spot in my upper back that hurts a
most of the time now, a knot in the muscle caused by too much desk
sitting. Lame—who gets an injury from a
desk job? Over the past couple months my
work has crowded out just about everything else.
The purpose
of all writing is to find the truth then say it, and the reason writing is hard
is that one of those things is usually difficult. As I watch the sunlight filter past green
leaves onto our brick courtyard floor, I think the difficulty now is with the
first part. But I think I have figured
it out. The truth is that although I
have long relished the esoteric, like what the habits of New Guinea highlanders
reveal about the emergence of nation-states from hunting-gathering bands, I
wasn’t as engrossed in Diamond’s book last night as I would have been two years
ago. I liked it but I kept getting
distracted by a question I wouldn’t have asked before: what’s the point of this?
Is that
inevitable? Maybe growing older is the
replacement of abstract musings with concrete practicalities. Maybe the shift in emphasis from one’s potential to one’s acts necessitates a focus on the immediate. Or maybe my distraction is a temporary result
of having allowed my work to crowd out most everything else.
For now,
though, the morning sun is shining, a pretty lady will soon awake in the next
room, and I’m not too worried about it. This island is begging to be explored. Maybe a week in the ‘Rico will tell the
answer.
Our courtyard.
Looking up from our courtyard.
The street outside our place.
The view from the end of our street.
As Key West is overrun with large feral chickens, San Juan is overrun with small feral cats. What would happen if the populations met?
