On the Eve of Departure

I wonder if when my parents gave me the above map for a birthday long ago they feared I'd someday trace a route upon it that would take me so far away from home, and for so long.

It all started innocently enough, just another pretty girl I was eying in a bar. She turned out to be different. Well-traveled, well-educated, with a turn toward exhortation. "These writers you talk about - Hemingway, Joyce, Marquez - look at their lives, full of travel and adventure. And you're here working for a bank. You should go find what you'll write about"

I was in need of a change. Four and a half years at a job that could hardly have been more wrong for me. I had abandoned my dreams of becoming a writer - an artist - for security, comfort, money. All the while feeling envy and shame before my friends who did have the balls to take a risk and go after what they wanted in life.

I went home from the Green Eye that night and drew with my finger the path that would be my journey. I'd start in Istanbul, then up through Central Europe to Germany, Holland, the U.K. After that, four months in Spanish-speaking lands: first the mother country Spain, then her colonies: Argentina, across the cone to Chile and up the west coast of South America to Colombia, Cuba, and finally Mexico.

It is an itinerary that mocks time and space: to do it in six months was a problem enough. I knew I wanted an adventure, but what what else was I trying to do - to solve? Funny that in an undertaking of this scale, the travel itself would be secondary. I would be starting my career as a writer - this was the great matter, the great problem to be trod out.

Thus I set off on two journeys: the lesser, physical one a symbol of the greater, of becoming what I will be.

Keep reading, won't you? Let's see how I do.

Location:Chicago