Reboot Your Life Page 2
When I spoke with a travel agent the next morning, it became quite clear that this trip was for avid bikers. She asked, “What size bike do you ride? What level rider are you?”
After a long pause, I said, “I’m not really sure,” which translated into “We haven’t touched a bike in twenty years.” The travel agent got us signed up and I happily told my husband the trip was a go.
Then we began investigating the biking planned for each day. Basically, it was breakfast, a brisk climb to a vineyard for lunch and wine tasting, then another ride with good climbs to the hotel for dinner. I should have thought hills, knowing Provence sits at the bottom of the Alps, but was horrified to see how long and how steep each day would be.
The trip itinerary said, “We begin with a short descent and then the consistent climb to Ménerbes.”
After several nights of nightmares about the Ménerbes climb, we dusted off our boys’ old mountain bikes and hit the park. Our local park has a popular five-mile flat loop circling a lake and many roads climbing big hills. As we rounded the lake, the “flat” loop didn’t seem quite so flat and had a long, gentle hill I’d forgotten about. In my lowest gear, sweat dripping down my face, I huffed and puffed to get up the gentle rise.
I thought I was doing pretty well until I started getting passed by walkers. My husband joked that people with walkers could pass me as my front tire veered left and right to keep me from falling over. I took frequent stops to catch my breath and drink from my water bottle. I was in big trouble. The last time I’d biked, I’d only ridden on the flat trails made from converted railway beds. And as I recalled, I’d gotten tired after about twenty miles or so of flat. Here I was, at least twenty-five pounds heavier, nearly two decades older, and planning to ride thirty to fifty miles a day with big hills.
What was I thinking?
I have two strong traits — I’m stubborn and I’m cheap. I’d set my mind to this challenge and the trip was already paid for. So my husband and I decided we could transform ourselves from flab to fit in three months. My husband spent hours poring over maps, measuring the distance, elevation, and steepness of each climb, while I rid the pantry of sweets, treats, and high-fat snacks. The minimum biker level we could sign up for on the trip was at least thirty miles a day with total climbs of 3,600 feet. My husband plotted out a ten-mile, 1,200-foot climb loop for us to work up to doing three times a day.
We also began to look at other bikers in the park. We noticed three things — they wore spandex, they had tiny butts, and they had thin and shapely legs with well-defined calf muscles. The first part was easy. We dug out the old spandex shorts our sons had worn on their high school rowing team. Our transformation was underway. Wearing spandex in public when you’ve got rolls and bumps you’ve been hiding under jeans is great motivation to lose weight.
Then we traded in the old mountain bikes that wouldn’t shift gears for new road bikes, and learned gear shifts are done by pushing the same lever as the brake, pedals are purchased separately from bikes, and “clipless” means you clip your shoes into pedals with cleats. And when they said to expect to fall over a few times getting used to the cleats, they were right.
Our summer was totally scheduled around biking. At the first hint of morning sun, we’d begin a ride before work. After work, it was back to the park for more miles. As the weeks wore on, I needed fewer rest breaks. My previously wide butt was becoming narrower, and one day I was watching my husband’s legs as he biked in front of me and exclaimed, “You’ve got calf muscles!” We were slowly transforming ourselves into real bikers. As the months passed, fewer bikers passed me, and I took great pleasure on those rare occasions I managed to zip past a young biker. I imagining him thinking, “Was I really just passed by an old lady?”
After two months, our conversations revolved around elevations and hill grades. We’d become masters at changing flats, dressing for rain or cold weather, and eating protein snacks as we rode. We increased the hills in our daily routine. When my butt muscles would burn in protest, I’d just think, “One climb closer to Mont Ventoux.”
As August ended, we had become more confident and Mont Ventoux was looking like a real possibility.
First day jitters on the trip soon ended when we left Ménerbes in the dust. In four days, we smiled at the top of Mont Ventoux, holding bikes overhead for our celebratory photo. Some people thought we’d never bike again after our trip. For those naysayers, I have news: We just finished our first century ride this weekend, completing eighty hilly miles our first day and 100 miles the next.
The trip to Mont Ventoux transformed more than our muscles. My husband and I renewed our vows to each other. We developed a special bond formed by overcoming a challenge, stopped thinking of ourselves as soon-to-be seniors, and started looking forward to new, exciting adventures together.
That June wedding helped us say “I do” to a world of possibilities we’d never imagined.
~Dawn A. Marcus
Life Launch
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
~Mark Twain
The kids grew up, moved away and left us in peace. Most evenings found us lying on separate couches in our living room. Television reflected crime scenes onto our skin, contrasting with our predictable home life. I’d fall asleep during the commercials and eventually stumble to bed with a book — where I’d fall asleep again.
We were snoozing ourselves into oblivion, and I feared this would continue. Our headstone might read, “Here lie the Paxtons — bored to death in the 21st Century.”
How do you fix a dull life? We’d talked about driving Route 66, backpacking the wilderness, navigating coastal waters. All just talk. Secretly I wondered if we’d ever do anything exciting again.
Then, within a couple of months, life as we knew it changed. Denny’s dad passed away, and our beloved fox terrier died of a mysterious ailment. Our daughter’s young friend lost his life, and several of our peers had bouts with cancer. We turned sixty as our marriage turned forty. Alarmed, we noticed photos of people our age moving into the obits, and we launched a series of conversations about life’s brevity.
As time slithered away, we revisited an old pipe dream and decided to buy a used boat. Experts recommended thirty-six to forty-two feet — a stretch for us kayakers — but comfortable for long trips or living aboard. In case a thirty-foot increase in boat length and twin diesel engines were not enough challenge, we acquired a puppy that needed to learn the art of polite peeing on a live-aboard boat.
Now, erase the picture in your mind of a trim sixty-year-old couple wearing captain caps, perched at the upper helm on an aqua sea. They maneuver neatly into a tropical port where dockworkers rush to gather the lines.
No, it looked more like this: “What if she refuses to pee on the boat?” asks the captain.
“I don’t know,” the first mate answers, not feeling seaworthy. “Heaven forbid she does her jobs everywhere, and it gets all stinky and such.”
First things first, we began pee pad training at home before acquiring a trawler. Puppy Smalls refused to pee on the pad. A determined sailor, I fenced in the pad and offered it at desperate moments. Success!
So began our thrilling future. Captain Paxton scoured the web for used trawlers. I scribbled numbers on tablets, wondering how long our pensions, semi-retirement jobs and pieces of our children’s inheritance could fund our dream. I had calculated one to ten years, just as my captain presented a list of twenty-five trawlers. We planned a Florida boat-hunt road trip.
Only our imaginations, our checkbook, and questionable sanity limited us. We departed the couches for west central Florida. We toured boats hugging the Gulf of Mexico, crossed the skinny state, and then boarded a string of trawlers in rivers along the Atlantic.
Stories flowed from vagabonds who had lived their sea dreams, elderly sailors now selling their dream vessels to new dreamers. “We lived aboard ten years,” sai
d one aging captain. “They were the best-lived years of our marriage. My wife is ill now.” A tear glistened in his eye as we dabbed at ours.
We discovered our own love-boat with a brokerage in Fort Pierce and made an offer.
What next? Will we still work? How will we operate this thing? We would make it up as we went.
Back on our Iowa couches, excitement lit our faces. “This was the best trip I’ve ever had!” I said. “I don’t even care if we buy the boat.”
A month later, we e-mailed an offer and counter offers, arrived at a price and headed back to Florida, where a professional boat surveyor would inspect our vessel. Then we’d hand over the money, fix small issues and sail away.
After survey day and a glorious cruise on a turquoise river, I lay coiled in fetal position on our El Cheap-o Motel bed. “I’m so sorry I killed our dream!” I wailed between sobs. I felt I’d just inspected a different boat — or the same boat through different eyes. Whichever it was, our love boat no longer looked like a place I’d love to live for nine months while navigating the intracoastal waterways. The surveyor detected my angst and counseled us.
“You don’t have to buy this boat. If you see deficiencies you missed before, either counter offer and have the items fixed, or withdraw your offer,” said the surveyor, my new hero.
We countered. The seller declined. End of pipe dream or nightmare. End of story.
Or so we thought. After a week of whining, we resumed our quest, navigating from couch to deck so we could enjoy the sunset. Each evening, we shifted puppy and books from lap to lap as we sailed through basic boating courses. Within another week, Captain Paxton presented a new list of old trawlers and a fresh road trip itinerary.
This time we started in Baltimore and drove down the East Coast, hoping past experience would help us find a sounder vessel at a better price, and it did.
Terrapin is a classy 1984 with solid mechanics, teak interior, and expansive deck. Our dream boat bobs happily in a slip at New Bern, North Carolina. This unplanned location suits us. We will stay six months or a year to enjoy the Crystal Coast and to sharpen our seamanship skills.
Back in Iowa for Christmas, our grown kids surprised us with a pirate-themed treasure hunt. At one point we were blindfolded, our hands tied together, using our feet to pull a line with a clue up a flight of stairs. Minutes later we lay on our frozen deck, fashioning a hook from a paper clip; we tied it to sewing thread and pulled a clue basket up from the snowdrift below. In the barn we uncovered a wooden chest of boating supplies. Our captors made us down a shot of rum and sing a sea shanty.
Today, from the windows of our floating home, we have new perspective in a watery world. Our brains exercise as we explore new plumbing, new knots, and new docking maneuvers. We conquer cooking challenges in a tiny galley. Our boating community regales us with stories collected from smooth and stormy voyages. We soak it all up as we form new friendships over glasses of wine.
Adventures beckon: a trip to the pump-out station, a dinner cruise to a neighboring town, a trip to the Outer Banks. The Great Loop. The Bahamas.
As I type, Smalls slumbers on a couch in the salon. She’s exhausted from a romp with Hank, her doggy pal from Dock C. Soon she will awaken and make the rounds on her floating doghouse, stern to bow. Smalls embraces her new-and-uncertain life with a vengeance. We hope to follow her lead.
~Kristi Paxton
Following My Nephew’s Dream
Commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer.
~Marcia Wieder
I’m not sure why I took the selfie, but I did. Sitting on my back porch in upstate New York in the late-winter thaw, I raised my iPhone and snapped a picture of a very glum individual. But why was I unhappy? I’d always been adept at figuring out internal discord, so I mentally started taking note of all the good things in my life. I was in love with my adoring wife, and we were raising our beautiful baby girl. In a down economy, I had a good-paying job that allowed my family to travel, which we enjoyed.
I eyed the forty-two-year-old man in the picture. Bottom line, I was dissatisfied with that successful job and didn’t want to leave the following morning for South Carolina where I would be overseeing a construction project. Another tedious undertaking of walking behind carpenters, electricians, and drywall installers, telling them what to do, and, like the man without the eyes in Cool Hand Luke, snapping the whip when it was time to push them faster.
What I really wanted as my dream job was what I was already doing on the side: writing and publishing fiction with my wife. We had started a little online magazine in 2008 devoted to short stories of any genre. It was a labor of love in the beginning, but a couple of years later during the eBook boom, we decided to try making some money from the publishing. It became a joke at my day job when I would say, “This assignment is my last.” Five years later, our bags were packed for our trip to The Palmetto State. It seemed like I would never have a last assignment.
I was leaving my home in the care of my nephew Kyle, who would watch over it while taking classes at the local community college. Like me, Kyle wanted to be a writer, and I had published his first poetry collection the previous year. He and I had been great buddies. I was the zany uncle, a close confidant. When I went away to the military, we lost touch, and when I came back, he was going through typical teenage strife with the added troubles of drugs and alcohol. Our relationship had changed. We struggled to find our lost common ground. We eventually found it in books and movies, though our relationship remained strained. I could see, despite his continued tribulations, that he was still an intelligent, loyal young man who was trying. When he said he would care for my house, I knew he’d do his best. And I would continue to help publish his work when I had time.
Charleston turned out to be a rewarding city with a rich history and beautiful parks and beaches, but the job itself was taking a toll on me. Unexpected delays cropped up at every turn. What was supposed to be a six-week assignment was going to take months. I didn’t want to stay that long. I had a writing and publishing venture calling me.
Back in New York, Kyle’s troubles were mounting once again as well. He was having a relapse from sobriety. On June 18, 2013, while I was getting ready for another stressful day of work, my wife burst into the bathroom to tell me my niece had called. Our house was on fire and they couldn’t find Kyle. I reeled from the shock.
I went into work as usual, anxiously awaiting news from home. Two hours later, the call came from my sister with the heart-wrenching words… they found Kyle’s remains by the back door; he didn’t make it out.
I left work, unable to focus or control the tears.
I took my little family back to New York for the service and spoke at the funeral. I stumbled around in shock. When I returned to work in Charleston, it was even harder than before as I tried to balance a job I already disliked with the loss of my nephew. I cried hard every day for the following month and searched for meaning wherever I could find it. Nothing seemed to help ease the pain. While our family had banded together and found strength, I needed something more. I strived relentlessly to get Kyle’s second poetry collection in print. I delved deep into his words. Still, no solace. And then one day, it happened.
After the assignment ended, and we returned to New York — again — I had the opportunity to read through Kyle’s dream journals that had been found in his parents’ house. Among the usual assortment of flights of fantasy and distorted meanderings of daily events, this chestnut popped up: “David had ended his career to write short stories and wear sweatpants and grow a beard ([Allen] Ginsberg) and write and I was ardent with admiration.”
That dream reassured me that my nephew cared for my happiness and me. The date in the journal entry showed he had dreamed this at a time when we were still somewhat at odds, long before I had published his first poetry. I cried again but with tears of joy.
I leafed further through his journals and found an entry about abstract time travel, an adventure
where he went into the past to save me from a work-related danger. At the end, he wrote, “The dream was also about how proud and reverent I am of my uncle, or how much I look up to him.”
Kyle’s words gave me strength for my next step. I knew it was time to use all of my vacation (two months’ worth) to just write… a thought that no doubt goes through the mind of every wannabe author with a day job. My wife and I had talked it over before, and we had been saving for several years, waiting for the right time to take the chance on writing and publishing. It hadn’t happened because there’s never a right time to throw caution to the wind and strike out across the desolate plain where there’s no certain income, no insurance, no security.
While the vacation days dwindled away, the passages from Kyle’s journals preoccupied me. My thoughts lingered on the poet, who had so much to offer, running out of time. The nephew who imagined his uncle a writer. His words, “I was ardent with admiration,” came back to me. I needed more time, and I was delaying the inevitable.
I wrote my boss and told him I wanted to go on intermittent status indefinitely. If they wanted to let me go, fine. I needed to follow not just my dream, but Kyle’s too.
And here I am, working from home. Mostly seven days a week. Watching what I spend. Some months enough comes in to pay the bills and other months I’m scrambling. But you know what? Now I’m smiling in all my pictures because I know Kyle is out there, proud of me. Just as I am of him.
~David Cranmer
A Risky Jump
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo da Vinci
I was in a blah phase of my life. I was carrying extra weight, my hair looked awful, and my favorite clothes were baggy jeans or sweatpants. My shoes were rubbery ugly-looking flats, perfect for the way I was plodding through life.