The sign above the departure lounge reads: Men who do not make their way in the world have no place in it. This fact disturbs me. Not because I agree with it so much as I suspect that it is true. For the better part of a decade now I've been hamstrung with indecision, my kinetic energy dwindling, my wanderlust buried beneath bills and responsibility. I even left New York, having sworn to spend the rest of my life there, to settle for the convenient ease of a Midwest city. And yet that too was accidental, a byproduct of inertia; our destination, at the time, had been California but we petered out before the Mississippi and began to acquire things.
I no longer write each morning, although today I have somehow managed to pick up this pen. Three manuscripts, two children's stories, an unfinished book of poems (they are for C.) later and I'm spent. Memos have become my life, email my blood. I don't think I've written a proper letter in over a year, and that to my sick granny. Occasionally the old me surfaces and I snatch up whatever ragged corner of newsprint I can find in the dark trying to lock down another false start; but like a burp it is far less satisfying than the original meal and in the morning I cannot make out its value. I can't help but think that I mention this last bit only because I fear my output of late has been less than admirable, my passion lost. I diddle now and again, but more at my cuticles and fingernails – the floor is littered with little white shards – than the page.
But something has been happening of late. Ever since I became Irish – and I have only recently become so – I've noticed a change. In a way then I am newly born, or christened. My un-birthday is 14 December 2000, the day my citizenship floated pod-like down a bureaucratic river of red-tape to lodge and germinate in the distant soil of my mind. Irish, Irish, Irish, I repeat over and over again. Slowly, the wanderer returns. An idea begins to form the way the morning light creeps over a still field of grass setting the stalks in motion. We must leave, I tell my wife. I force her to quit her job as I have done mine. But what about babies, she says. Her look forced an examination of conscience. That too will come, I reply. Europe must be explored. That venture is about to begin, spurred on by what has already been.
We travel with the ghosts of our past adventures. Some of those tales are recorded here.