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September 17, 2015
I’m 66. Retired, not from the realm of action but from being some organization’s employee. The vacuum this creates is expected to be filled with recreation, travel, helping out with the grandchildren, crossword puzzles, volunteer work, and more helping out with the grandchildren. I’m doing all that, except for the crossword puzzles. Even though a facility with words is my only discernable skill, I don’t do crossword puzzles. Never have. I don’t know why.
We had a loose plan, Joan and I – two big trips per year until we couldn’t any more or didn’t want to, whichever came first. We got half-way through year one and it’s already broken down. Instead of going to Portugal or Macedonia or anywhere with my wife, I’m going to India with our son. Oh well. It seemed like a good plan at the time and that’s what actually matters.
I have already identified the proximal cause as Jeremy asking me to join him after all his best options were non-starters. I’m not being coy. Wives and best friends both make better travel companions than Dads, you’d have to figure. I was available and we’ve always been close. Done. I just intuitively said yes when he asked for my help and what more do you need to say than that?
I guess I’d also like it to be about me and my most important aspirations at least some. India was once on a proto-bucket list when I was less than 30 years old because of the romance, the Raj, and the Mahareshi. I began a daily practice of transcendental meditation, a Hindu tradition, in 1974. I read the Raj Quartet in 1982, before it came out on PBS, because I realized I had almost been a History Major and I had never taken a single course about the history of India, or anywhere else in Asia for that matter. By the time I was 40, I still wanted to go to India, for unrealistic romantic reasons that could not have been satisfied by my actually going there, which was out of the question because I was too busy. There were no sabbaticals in my field, which was free-lance smart guy.
I gave up on India, saw it in my rear view mirror, saw it as somewhere I once thought I wanted to go to for all the wrong reasons. It’s the right time now because it has emerged, from my perspective, without being driven by my projected needs. That’ll be different, if it’s true.
September 14, 2015
I am drastically oversimplifying what even a cursory investigation of, say, document security involves. Think of a part of your body – there is a product that will hide things there, I guarantee it. With or without RFID blockers. You’re not even done on the water safety front when you’ve finally eliminated everything else but the SteriPen line; now it’s like, was that rechargeable or lithium?
But I did it, and that sense of self-efficacy propelled me on into … vaccinations and immunizations. I’m nice and up-to-date on the obvious ones. However, traveling to India raises the question off malaria and yellow fever. The latter is clearly off the CDC’s current worry-about-it list. That’s enough for me since other factors make the live yellow fever vaccine a bad idea in my case. Malaria is another matter. The long-time scourge of our species, kept in play by our own actions or inactions at this point.
The CDC offers three options and not one of them is something you would ever choose unless absolutely forced to. One of them, Mefloquine can cause, “dizziness, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, vivid dreams, and visual disturbances, and in rare instances seizures, depression, and psychosis.” Unfortunately for his (and maybe my) perception of probabilities, Jeremy knows someone who was the rare instance. Almost killed the guy and took him out for a year. He wrote a book about it. We’ll probably choose one of the other two, which both involve a shitty-feeling pills every day in India and for weeks after.
I will be discussing all this with the Kaiser Travel Nurse, but I felt that I should come to that discussion with some knowledge and informed inclinations of my own. I hope the Nurse will recommend Malarone (Atovaquone-Proguanil) as it seems the easiest tolerated and least extended. Probably why it’s the most expensive.
September 9, 2015
I started with security. I am not by nature a careful person, plus I don’t enjoy shopping at all. Trying to decide what to spend on stuff I never think about almost froze me with too much input and no personal organizing framework in place to handle it. But I persevered, drew on all of my scanning and filtering skills and took an intuitive plunge.
I now have a PacSafe CoverSafe 125 Secret Belt Wallet, with the RFID Blocking Sleeve Kit on order, for a mere $39.90 (save $2.00!) from corporatetravelsafety.com. This pouch will hold my passport and a few other items, tucked into my pants and secured to my belt, and protect me and I guess the documents too from those wireless personal information interceptor techies.
Feeling better already, I moved on to an equally perilous essential – water. Get it wrong and you live with Delhi Belly for your whole sojourn. Did you know about UV Water Treatment? I didn’t, but I sure do now. For $50 you can buy a magic wand (that’s what it looks like) that purifies one liter of water in 90 seconds by zapping “more than 99.9% of microorganisms,” (to which I ask, how much more than 99.9%, and why not just say that?). I ordered one – the SteriPen “Aqua,” drove over to REI to pick it up and bought some delicious looking emergency travel rations while I was there.
September 7, 2015
There was a lot we could be open about, though, like dope and critical thinking and feelings. We developed a vocabulary, a way of being together that worked, worked great actually. I was a cool dad because of this openness. He could bring his friends over and they could talk with me about things they couldn’t with their own parents.
We drifted along and rested on our laurels for a while after he left for college and the rest of his life. When I visited him in his dorm, my reputation preceded me and so I joined the late night revelry and further cemented our closeness. He majored in religion at Earlham, a Quaker school in Indiana. I majored in philosophy back during the sixties at Haverford, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania.
Now he’s a husband and a father and a minister with his first congregation. I love him. As an unexpected bonus, I can feel what it’s like being him sometimes, not always and of course not 100% the way it actually is for him, but close enough to make me cry. He’s the gatekeeper. He lets me see what he chooses, or thinks he does, and we both know about this dynamic, could talk about comfortably and even familiarly. Nevertheless, all channels have to be exercised and stretched. Too much same-old-same-old makes it another not-present channel. The problem being, keeping the father-son connection fresh is up against competing priorities that usually win hands-down.
Religion-expressed-openly-in-everyday-life, more than any other factor, is why Jeremy wants to go to India on his sabbatical. He wants to experience it, get right up next to it and see what it actually means. Make it an intimate part of his experience, that he can draw on forever. To do this, we’re not staying in 5-star hotels. We’re staying in guest houses where Indian people stay and we’re planning on getting ourselves out and into things. It will be a stretch for him, being almost 40 now and all. It’ll be more of a stretch for me.
There’s probably easier ways to reinvigorate a relationship than international travel to the developing world, but we’re not doing them. We’re going to India.
August 14, 2015
Delhi, Khushwant Singh, 1990
Capital, Rana Dasgupta, 2014
Delirious Delhi, Dave Prager, 2011
They don’t make me want to jump on an airplane headed for Indira Gandhi International Airport, but that’s just what I’ll be doing in less than 12 weeks. The first one was written by India’s best known contemporary writer, who brings seven centuries of conquest and bloodshed over that spot in northern India to life, as an epic love story. The second one was written by one of India’s most celebrated young writers, and it indicts the city on every count imaginable of 21st century excess, corruption and casual indifference to inequality. Yet he chooses to live there. The third was written by a young American who lived, with his wife, and worked there for a year and a half and shares a compulsively readable set of insights about why it is frequently awful there. They loved the place.
I’m intrigued, and more than a little intimidated. I’ve traveled some in other parts of Asia -- China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore. Delhi feels scarier, in terms of my health, in terms of getting ripped off, and in terms of anticipated difficulties. I’ll only be there for three weeks, but how long does it take to get malaria? Best street food in the world, if you can eat it. Which means personally witnessing every stage in the entire cultivation process from seedling to table being accomplished with bottled water, preferably a western brand.
These concerns are not a matter of me whining about something coming up that I don’t want to do, if only my son hadn’t asked me. It makes me feel like a million bucks that my son asked me, and I do want to do it. The concerns are just a matter of reporting on what I read. Here’s another example: I’m used to just-walking-anywhere when I have time in a city I don’t know. It’s almost always rewarding, but in Delhi, according to knowledgeable commentators, the overall urban design seriously limits where walking can happen and what can be seen from the street even where it is possible. And then there’s the river, a central part of most river cities, like Paris, London, or New York, and a non-part of Delhi. It is inaccessible, no walking along the banks of the Yamuna.
I’ll be in Delhi by myself for five days at the end of the journey. We land there, stay for two days, then hit the railways for Amritsar, Agra, Jaipur, and Varanasi over a two week period together. The last five days are Deepawali or Diwali, which we will experience in Jaipur, famous for its colored lights display, and Varanasi, the center of religion in India. After that ecstatic end to our shared India road trip, we'll separate, with Jeremy visiting more steps-of-The-Buddha places and me heading back to Delhi for five days on my own before flying home.
So Delhi will be the place that I explore all by myself in just a bit more depth. I thought it made sense -- check out the cutting edge of crazy, out-of-control mega-cities from a nice middle class Airbnb. That's why I read the three books. And the more I read, the more I wanted to view things inside an invisible protective shield when I'm actually there. I must be overreacting. I learned my way around Hong Kong on my own. I've strolled solo in Kuala Lumpur and Istanbul, and waded right into the traffic in Hanoi as a pedestrian.
How could Delhi be at some whole other level of frightening and dangerous intrusiveness? It can't. As long as we're smart. As long as we realize that the wonderful looking coconut slice the street guy is selling looks so wonderful, in part, because he keeps sprinkling water on the whole tray so they'll all look nice and moist and irrestible. That was not-bottled water by the way -- we need to recognize threats like that over and over. We will not be in hermetically sealed five-star hotels. We are not part of a Group. Our restaurants will not be pre-selected.
Also I think the Delhi that these three very well-regarded and no doubt quite accurate books portrays is not the one we will be experiencing on a moment-by-moment basis. The books are kind of like "Big Data" -- they compress and highlight to reveal patterns and tendencies in an otherwise incomprehensible situation. But they don't say much about what'll happen the first time I walk out into Delhi myself. As long as I don't drink the water, in which case we do know.
August 8, 2015
If I had to list ten adjectives to describe our son, “religious” wouldn’t be one of them, which is a little strange since he is a minister. I don’t think ‘spiritual” would be either, but it’s closer. “Cosmically-inclined” would be better, and definitely captures part of him. What it misses is how well he does in the here and now when he chooses to. Both of these dimensions matter in India I suspect -- being attuned to living, ecstatic spiritual practice expressed openly in the culture, and being able to cope with stuff. These are subtle attributes, though, and sometimes anxieties are part of that package. So a navigator can help, especially getting started.
I wasn’t the first choice, but I’ll do. Better than that hopefully. We both have cosmic inclinations and we’re both drawn to the India of the Bhagavad Gita, of the Varanasi ghats, and Deepawali in Jaipur. We’ve always been close in the realm of ideas. I was a Philosophy major; he has a Masters of Divinity. It’s not the only bond we share, but it’s a big part of why this Father-Son Journey makes sense. Which doesn’t mean all sailing will be smooth. We can both be prickly characters.
It became clear in early June that we were doing this (five months before his planned departure), but the idea may have originated a long time ago -- that sometime we would both want to be immersed in what India is known for.