what is my saga?

Never mind asking, "What is my sign?" (It is Sagittarius, but that explains or predicts very little, in my worldview.) It is more apt to ask, "What is your saga?" Now we're talking. Epic tales of conquest or defeat; heroic journeys; enlightening discoveries; noble orations.

My saga is in progress.

It is often ordinary but sometimes surprising in its twists, its shocks, its steps, its songs.

Isn't that what I've been reciting or humming here, my saga?

Characters come and go.

The tune morphs.

The plot thickens.

Or thins. 

pre-Iceland: phase 1

Sheets of Sunday rain cascaded onto the thwacking windshield wipers of my 2007 VW Rabbit. Dark, windy curtains of driving rain greeted me as I sailed south on 81. Much of the time, I left the radio and CD player off. The rain was soundtrack aplenty for the drive that would take me to dear old friends in Florham Park, New Jersey, before flying out of EWR on Monday evening to Reykjavik, Iceland. Around Scranton, fumbling for decent music (rare), I tuned in sports-themed radio stations (FoxSports and ESPN). They delivered second-hand reports of the Seahawks-Vikings playoff game, but I soon tired of their false camaraderie and juvenile banter reminiscent of locker room towel snapping. I mildly rooted for the Vikings (after all, look where I am headed), but I later learned they lost a heartbreaker. Vikings. Heartbreak. Are encounters with Viking descendants the perfect cure for broken hearts, minds, or souls? That question is a shade too cute, even for this writer prone to the showy, cutesy turn of phrase. I suggest it is more accurate to say my Iceland journey is just that: a journey, a reset -- not so much a "cure" for anything. By encountering new vistas, fresh air, new sounds, new people, it will be like taking the Etch-a-Sketch and turning it upside down, shaking it, and scrubbing it of the angular, jagged drawing that was not working anyway. As for this first phase of the trip, I was consoled by my own company. Per her request, I texted trip updates to my youngest daughter back in Syracuse. In Pennsylvania hills before the Poconos, I heard the Rosary intoned. The Third Glorious Mystery: The Coming of the Holy Spirit. I resisted changing the station. Why not? I figured. Each Hail Mary was begun by a male voice who prayed up to and including the word "Jesus." The ten Hail Marys in each decade (dekkid, a severe nun of my childhood pronounced it) were finished by a female voice ("now and at the hour of our death. Amen."). They both had vaguely Irish accents, and the echo in their recitations made it sound like they were in a chapel. As I was listening to this, on a hill to my right, a billboard proclaimed "ULTIMATE MASSAGE. 24/7. No waiting." At a rest stop just inside New Jersey, shortly after the dramatic escarpments of the Delaware Water Gap, I texted my friend Hoagie telling him to tell Brett I had just driven through East Stroudsburg, the area where Brett used to live. By the time I was in the Garden State, the sun blazed through amidst wind-scudded cumulus, casting shadows on hills visible for miles. Temps in the fifties. And after arriving in Florham Park (the second locus of a ten-year stay in Jersey, where two of my children were born), conversation and coming and going. Then eloquent grace from Randy and a grand dinner with nine or ten around the table (family friend Michelle and I the only lefties and seated accordingly), vegetarian delights (couscous, spinach pie, eggplant), stories, laughter, and absence (with the patriarch gone almost a year ago). Today, departure. Like a nervous Nellie or eager child, I fret whether all my documents will be in order or some snag halts the progress of this narrative. Time will tell. It always does.

my Iceland persona

Who will I be in Iceland less than two weeks from now? It is a question less pompous than it appears to be (I hope). I know I don't want to be the Ugly American: boorish, brash, impatient, arrogant, incurious. Though how avoidable will that be? Surely I will cart along with me all the cultural trappings that have conditioned my personality thus far. Nothing wrong with that. I can't help it anyway. It would be impossible to decondition myself in less than two weeks, stripping myself of prior personal shaping and sculpting, making myself as bare and barren as an Icelandic wintry landscape. And what would I be? Who would I have become? I can picture myself in a Reykjavik coffee shop, blabbling mercilessly about my books and my spiritual journey, affecting an urbane and witty pose, handing out my cleverly designed Moo cards, flirting with locals; in short, a hungry and not very accidental tourist. But what if the denizens of the place prefer solitude, silence, and taciturn unengagement? What if nothing is as I anticipate in scale or flavor or atmosphere? Naturally, nothing will be exactly as I envision beforehand. It is never exactly as envisioned.

And that's why we go.

visions of Reykjavik

Reykjavik. Once you learn how to spell it, you're halfway there, right? Iceland. The thought of journeying to Iceland beckons to me on an unseasonably uncold Tuesday night in Syracuse, New York. Go north, and then north of there. Go to the planet's true north, its northernmost capital. While others go to the Cayman Islands (as I once did) or Belize or Puerto Rico or Mexico, you name it, to a warmer clime, I am fantasizing doing deeper, going into the cold, mine and Nature's. Solo. And why not. Just the name of the country invites stoic challenge, though geothermal springs dispel those notions, as do stories of all-night revellers and Nordic, guilt-free abandon. Why not. Having flown to Ireland and Germany and seen the in-flight map of Transatlantic flight progress displayed on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me, and in those instances flying over Iceland, and thinking, wow, we are almost there, in Europe (though not quite; is Iceland in Europe?), I am thinking, Let's skip the continental Europe part and see what Iceland offers, even if no ice is there, literally or metaphorically.

On (And Off) The Road

The trip with Ballet Daughter (BD) to Saratoga Springs, the place of "health, horses, heritage," the venue of midsummer night's pleasures, and the "scene of the crime," proceeded smoothly, providing an opportunity to muse about family, feelings, and other journeys, with this journey feeling strangely slow-motioned both at the very beginning and at the very end. Make of that what you will metaphorically. (Grammar Lesson: a long sentence is not the same as what laymen call a "run-on sentence"; length has nothing to do with that solecism. A sentence can "run on" for pages and still be legitimate and grammatically correct, and not qualify as a run-on sentence.)

For BD, it occasioned a temporarily tense but ultimately joyful reunion of balletic friends.

I fantasized solitary Saratoga pleasures: smoke a cigar, read the Saturday Times or The Economist, stroll along Broadway. Take in the crowds. Turned out to be too crowded for that. Expensive and hard-to-find parking. I soon wanted out of Dodge.

I settled for the definitely not upscale but tasty Boston Market, sitting at the counter listening to the woeful Giants on XM radio.

Turning left onto Route 9 South, I tried to take the way I had come but got a little lost. In that interim, the Giants' Randy Winn hit a grand slam to narrow the score to 7-6, with satellite radio frustratingly fading in and out. I got onto Interstate 87 in the shimmering sunset but bailed out at Route 5, knowing Route 5 West goes all the way to Buffalo. The motives? A little adventure, a sense of mystery, and why give New York State all that toll money? No, maybe the motive even touches on lostness, the flirtation with danger.

"Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know you won't! For you have found me. All I have to do is stay found." -- Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

Taking Route 5 was like traveling into the 1950s, into the pre-Thruway world. A slower journey through Niskayuna and into Schenectady (to whom I had just sent a proposal on Friday; coincidentally [or not] I saw some of the routes cited in the proposal as well as the street where the document was sent).

Aquarius Gentlemen's Club, dark and shuttered, no neon to tempt me or others. A McDonald's (coffee as an excuse to use the bathroom, which had to be opened by a counter person; not a good indicator of the neighborhood's safety). Streets lined with vendors and visitors; storefronts and porches. Churches. Hints of better days. I was not afraid, but I knew my limits. Called Apple-of-My-Eye Son (AMES) on cellphone and told him of my wayward trek. Might've scared him a bit; he counseled me to be brief so as to avoid using up the phone's battery. Through Downtown Schenectady and out along the old Erie Canal and Mohawk River, on the opposite side of the faster and sleeker Thruway, the Thruway that provides fewer opportunities for careful observation and up-close human (or other) interaction. Two freight trains, each at least a half-mile long and maybe as much as one mile long, snaking by on my left peeking through treelines and staghorn sumac. The occasional shack, farms, a horse farm that looked like a small boomtown all its own. Dirt drag racing in Fonda or was it Fultonville with locals not wanting to pay peering over fences like a scene depicted by the false and sentimental Norman Rockwell. Amsterdam, its mills long gone. This is the sorry and sturdy heart of Richard Russo Country.

The Giants somehow tie it at 7 in the ninth.

Finally, at Canajoharie, I bailed out. It was all taking too long.

Back on the Thruway.

Back to Modern Life.

The Yankees announcer on trad radio said my boys lost 8-7, in 12.

The rain intermittent and slight enough for the windshield wipers to smear my vision.

Home by 10:30.

Irish Stepdancer Daughter (ISD) performs a flying druidic leap into my arms.

"Daddy!"

Caught.

Safe.

"Will you snuggle?"

"Sure."

There, there.