Day 200, Wednesday, December 21

I spent most of the morning and a bit of the afternoon working on catching up on this journal. I’ve taken many pictures, but I’ve not done any writing since I left Peter’s house in San Diego. Trying to look back 15 days and recall what I did and what I was feeling definitely gets challenging.
Family friends from Mobile, the Perrys, have invited me to dinner this evening and I’m supposed to show up around 7:30. Apparently they’re early to bed people so later than that would definitely not be kosher.
After finishing my work on the journal (I wrote entries up through Dec 20) Aunt Penny invited me to go around with her to deliver the “neighborhood gifts”. That’s a concept I’ve not heard since we left Mobile back in 6th grade and it requires something definitely worth writing about and which I’ve not had since leaving Mobile. A sense of community. Uncle John and Aunt Penny have lived in the same basic area of town since Fall of 1979. They know everything about everybody there. Who the kids are, where they’re going to school, whom they’re dating, who’s said what about whom, etc. On top of that they’re good friends with just about all of their neighbors and often join the neighbors in their houses for cocktails after work. I can’t even conceptualize that. Since leaving Mobile, I’ve never lived anywhere that I had a community I could call my own. Granted, I wouldn’t trade my life experiences for someone who grew up entirely in one town. I’ve simply seen and traveled to too many different places to want to change a thing, but I often wonder what it would be like to be able to go back to the house my parents are living in and say “This is home. I grew up here.” Or maybe…”Mrs Brown, whom I’ve known for all of my life, was over visiting with my parents when….”. I simply don’t have anything I can relate to that way. Truly, the only place that’s remained constant in my life has been our family place, Happy Hollow, in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We vacationed at Happy Hollow every single year of my childhood and I’ve been back many times as an adulthood. If you drove me by Happy Hollow blind folded, I could tell you I was there simply from the wonderful smell.
But Happy Hollow is, however, a place, not a community. I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. I definitely wouldn’t want to trade places with someone who’s grown up in only one place and hasn’t had the opportunities I’ve had to see different areas of the country. I’m quite happy to have the broader background, and I’ve made enough life long friends along the way to fill in where I need community. At this point, my hope is that wherever I end up after getting into my imminent job search, will be a place where I’m willing to invest myself emotionally, rather than just another address, like every place I lived in Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, and Illinois.
Larry Kachadourian suggested a week or so ago that I look into what I’ve felt along the trip and I think that’s a wonderful idea. Setting off on the trip, I really expected to have long periods of feeling lonely. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that’s not been the case. Sure I’ve felt lonely on occasion, and I’ve definitely missed the presence of a woman in my life. After all, I’ve not had the chance to date anybody since late last Winter. I also expected to feel disconnected (in a negative way) from society along with that loneliness. Thankfully, however, neither loneliness nor any feeling of melancholiness have been the prevailing feelings of this trip. I’ve found that I really enjoy the long stretches of solitude on the bike. They’ve given me lots of time to spend meditatively. Anybody who knows me knows that I basically never take time to mentally relax and just do nothing. I’ve always got a project going or am between activities. I’ve always felt I could rest after I’m buried or my ashes are scattered. On this trip, I can’t help but spend time examining who I am and where I feel I’m going in life. It’s a bit scary to really spend time thinking about that day after day after day. On the other hand, it’s made me very comfortable that my choice to ditch the “real world” for half a year was definitely the right choice at the right time.
As for loneliness, I hardly have time for it. It’s the rare time when I stop my bike and dismount when I don’t find myself having a conversation about some aspect of travel or interests with a stranger. I’d bet I’ve had less than a dozen times in the entire 200 days where I’ve pitched camp and not had great conversations with my neighbors. Anybody who’s read this journal has read about the incredible number of people who’ve extended me their hospitality. Whether the hospitality is in the form of a little kid coming over in the morning offering a fresh caught trout for breakfast, or of a large family gathering taking me in as one of their group and “forcing” me to eat melt-in-your-mouth peach cobbler, or people stopping me at gas stations or grocery stores and offering me, a complete stranger, the chance join a small part of their lives and stay with them for a while. I hate to sound clichéd but this trip has done a great deal towards restoring my faith about the decency of people, a faith which was, at best, put on hold while living in Chicago. Yes, I had LOTS of friends and acquaintances in Chicago, but in the 8 years I lived there I rarely felt the warmth from my acquaintances that I felt from so many complete strangers, now good friends, on this trip.
I tell everybody I meet on this trip that I’ve got to treat the trip like a once in a lifetime opportunity but that I hope dearly, having lived this experience, it won’t be the last. It’s also going to make me look differently at people in the future and take the risk to invite strangers in to *MY* life like people have done for me.