Travel Adam

-
I decided to take an extra day off on the front end, just to be safe. For one reason or another. Either to ease my mind and hands with more time to pick and pack and prepare, or to double the hours to worry and generally fiddle about. To be calm or not to be calm, that is the question.

One of my more recently adopted holiday traditions is to watch "A Christmas Carol" on the network F/X. This version came out in 2019, starring Guy Pearce as Scrooge, but a deeply troubled, OCD character with a dark past of child abuse and morally ambiguous business dealings. Six hours long, so prepare yourself for a deep dive if you give it a go. Its opening scene starts with the title card "1843. The Eve of Christmas Eve" which I find both poetic and clunky. A clever repetition of the word "Eve" while laying bare the fact that we don't have a term for the night two nights before a momentous occasion. The Eve of the Eve? We should have a word for that.

My first thought was " the Penultimeve" but I doubt that would catch on. Then I considered, well, what comes before Eve? Obvious, isn't it? Adam. Adam came before Eve. Thus if December 25 is Christmas Day, then the 24th is Christmas Eve and the 23rd is Christmas Adam. Simple as that.

Christmas Adam is the maddening time when, as a kid, you could almost see the big day, taste it, smell it, pack it tight like a snowball, because basically everything was ready and in place. Tree decorated, check. Presents wrapped, check. Baby Jesus lost, check. In our house, little plastic Baby Jesus didn't make his grand appearance in the bookshelf manger scene until Christmas morning, so my dad would dutifully hide the swaddled figure behind a nearby knickknack or picture frame. I usually found the infant after marching all the figures around like biblical army guys, and I would replace the Baby Jesus behind a different piece of living room tchotchke. Much to my dad's consternation when he went downstairs before us kids on the big morning to turn on the tree and set the final figurine in His rightful place, only to find our Lord and Savior had gone AWOL. Probably flew the coop on Christmas Adam too.

So tonight I dust off the travel blog I started for my solo Egypt trip, with either too much or not enough time on my hands. The giant blue suitcase, likewise, has been pulled from the shadowy depths and spread-eagles itself to be packed, unpacked, and then repacked. I took an extra day off from Amazon for this moment. Not the night before I set off on the biggest, bucket-list adventure of my post-Becky life, not quite, not the Eve of my Travel, that's 24 hours from now. Tonight everything is in place, waiting patiently to go. Tonight is my Travel Adam.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Tale of Two Tour Guides

-
     In the 1990s, a popular show called "The X-Files" followed the paranormal adventures of Scully and Mulder, a pair of mismatched FBI agents. They had shadowy associates to help them solve the unsolvable. One group was three IT/conspiracy nerds who called themselves The Lone Gunmen (after the JFK conspiracy that Oswald couldn't have been the only shooter). The irony, of course, is that if you're a group of three, how can you possibly be "lone"?      When I described my travel plans to friends, I said that in Egypt, I would be in a tour group of "solo travelers." A few times, I got a response similar to The Lone Gunmen. You're a group of solos? Wouldn't that be a chorus?      Yes, indeed.      I certainly wasn't brave, or foolhardy, enough to attempt to get through the terra incognita completely on my own wits. Too vast, too different, too alien (to me). So, for nine days, I traveled solo with a band of seven others. Life-lon...
Read more

The Elephant In The Room

-
     From here on, the singular pronoun gets used. "I went there." "I did this." For me, it's a big step, as you can imagine. The first of many I intend on taking over the next three weeks. It's not "we," it's not Becky and me. It's I.      I: me, first person, singular. Single. Alone, out there, on the high wire. By myself i: in mathematics, it's an imaginary unit, meaning it doesn't really exist, and that strangely, suits me just fine.      Aye-aye: yes, yup, okey dokey, in the affirmative. Agreement.      Eye-eye: the dual headlamps, the pair of squishy organs that draws light into the body and asks the brain to interpret it, what do you think you see in front of you? What is staring back at you?     As a symbol, t he human eye stands for perception, knowledge, and insight. Divine providence and protection from evil. Both of those sound like good weapons to hold close on my travels.      In ancient E...
Read more

Dinner and a Show, For One

-
In my lifetime, I've walked out of Penn Station onto the grimey, frenzied streets of Manhattan, say a dozen times. That's probably being generous. Undoubtedly every time I make that walk, I start off in the wrong direction from my intended destination. It's all a pulsing, honking, hurrying Jackson Pollock painting that my feet carry me into, and rather than stop and deduce my next steps, I just get shoved one way by the mass of humanity, and it's always the wrong way. I hit the first well-marked intersection and realize that I want to numbers to get bigger, not smaller. (But the avenue numbers to get smaller, not bigger.) Seems like there should be a sing-song mnemonic to help new arrivals: "If you smell pee a-flowing, then it's north you're going." See, honey, I told you this was the right way! Traveling alone allows you make make wrong turns without judgment or ridicule. Wrong turns, wrong decisions. Walking from Penn Station at 33rd and 8th to my ho...
Read more