Force Majeure

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    An apology to you, Dear Reader, is in order.

    When I was working with Tracy on my book, she confided to me early that she didn't care for the cliche "cancer journey." In her opinion, it was overused, a bit stale these days. Moreover, a journey should be joyful, exciting, a time to explore and meet and taste and indulge. Cancer, obviously, was far from any of those delightful treats.

    I hesitate to call this trip a journey, but for the opposite reason. Yes, it has been a joyful, exciting time full of new experiences that tease all my senses. But a journey implies a linear travel, like the animated maps in an Indiana Jones movie. A bright red line drawn from Luxor to Cairo to Istanbul to terminate with a flourish on a tiny island in the Mediterranean: Malta.

    This experience for me has morphed from a simple red line to a 3-D matrix of moments and images and flavors (and belly laughs and gasps of silent wonder ("Just think for a moment where we are right now."). Not a journey in the pedestrian sense at all. Call it The Breakdown of the Analog Travelogue. So I offer an apology to you, because my narrative skills can't describe, can't reproduce the past few days. Hardly time to sit still (by choice) and hardly time to digest and catalog.

    This morning I sit in the kitschy lounge of my boutique hotel, 19Rooms, on St. Christopher Street in the charming capital city of Valletta, on the island of Malta. The continental breakfast is a long table set with meats and pastries, fruits and breads, labeled "local milk" and "local treats." Soon I will stroll the tight, alley-like streets on 500-year-old flagstones to the Fast Ferry dock. Buy a ticket to the island of Gozo and meet Edward, my local tour guide for the day.

    How did I get here? What have I seen? Tasted? Listened to? Who have i chatted with? How do I tell you about it?

    Yesterday in the Istanbul airport, I boarded a shuttle bus to go out and meet the airplane on the runway. Two buses of passengers were driven, parked at the aircraft's wing, and made to wait. We witnessed a flurry of jumpsuited technicians scuttle about in earnest work. After a bit, we were all driven back to the terminal, and told we were moving to a new terminal and a new airplane. With a sixty-minute delay. No reason given, other than "force majeure."

    Oxford offers two definitions.

    1. unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract.

    2. irresistible compulsion or superior strength.

    An act of God. Understandable, and we should probably be thankful for the technical crew who discovered the mechanical troubles. We flew away from Istanbul safely later that morning. But I like the second definition too. That's how I feel got to this table in this hotel in this city on this island in this sea on this planet. Irresistible compulsion. Superior strength. A force majeure.

    But don't ask me to describe it.

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