severence

Sometimes I wonder if I could walk away from everything, everyone, and every place (home) that I love and take the flight to a place I've never been and just wander. With a pack on my back, a sleeping bag for the chance I can't find established accommodations, and a beaten passport with three years left on it to fill up with visa & exit/entry stamps. I must admit, my urge to flee the United States to a foreign destination at least once a year is tempered by homy-ness. I attribute it to my ethnic background, which is known for keeping unmarried women living with their parents, considers close family 1st and 2nd cousins and wants less than an hour apart between each relation. A culture in which it's the norm for the bride to cry as she is escorted out by her crying father and uncomfortable-looking new husband on each side as her female relatives bawl hysterically at the end of the wedding reception. A culture where mothers are known to lapse into depression when an offspring flies the nest.

Right now my mother is upset and my father has taken to riding his bicycle in front of our mother's house, begging, pleading for my sister not to go to South Africa for a two year Peace Corps stint. They did this to me when I went to South Korea. This is the second time my sister has endured this, the resilient girl, when she went to Kenya for the summer two years before. I'm not going to even try to think of the hell and anguish I'll bring on them and myself if I am ever selected to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. My sister asked me to do something outrageous to get their attention off her and onto me.

But enough about my family and on a lighter note, I do have a friend who has been wandering through this world, uprooted himself from the trappings of the job, the career, the home, kids and wife, who is missed. Neil.