Saying good-bye to Walter Patrick

Last week I had to something completely unexpected: I had to step foot on United States soil before June 1, 2015. And it was to do something I had expected but still thought would never come: My step-father, Walter Patrick, passed away. When I left for Colombia, he was on hospice care and a decent amount of morphine, but he was still cognizant most days, and when he wasn't, I normally chalked it up to the massive amounts of painkillers he was taking. I can't promise you I'm going to get the details right, but his problem, as I understood it, was basically advanced emphysema made worse by a back injury he sustained after he had a violent coughing attack one night, and then further complicated by a devastating case of pneumonia. After fighting with the pneumonia for some time, he was eventually rushed to the hospital, where they induced a coma in order to allow his body to rest, and when he was taken out of it, his physical therapy proved to be so taxing that it sent him back into another coma. When he awoke from that one, his care was switched from restorative to the ease-your-suffering variety. All this happened while I was away, still living in New York, and it was one of the things that influenced me to come back early.

I officiated their wedding.
On the left is his oldest son, Wally,
and behind my mother is
my sister Samantha.

Walt and my mother met and got married after I had already moved out of the house, and I only saw him on visits back. A week here, another there. And slowly, over time, we got to know each other. Toward the end of his life, he told me he viewed me as a son. I think I would have viewed him as a father if I had known exactly what that meant. My father and mother divorced when I was about five, and when I was about eleven, he moved to Colorado. I didn't see him much after that. I don't really know what a father is. I get clues and hints, through my relationship with my Uncle Steve and without a doubt through my relationship with Walt.

In the month before I came to Colombia, I was living with him and my mother in Indiana. She needed help taking care of him, and I wanted to see my family before I left for a long time. It was in that month that I grew even closer to Walt. I helped care for him when my mother was tired, getting him Pepsi and Kool-Aid and those brownies he positively addicted to, he bandaged my ankle for me when I twisted it so badly running that I walked with a limp, we had heart-to-hearts, watched Bunnyman, and I even remember giving him a stern pep talk when he was starting to get down on himself and life, asking me and my mom what the point of planning was when there was so little time left or why bother to leave the house to his beloved casino when all it did was making him sleep for the rest of the day. I found myself, in idle moments, trying to plan the viability of a trip back to the United States around Christmas time, if I could afford it, when would good dates be, maybe I'd go a little bit before Christmas to not disrupt other plans but we'll check the prices and see...

According to him, it was
the very definition of ambrosia.

And then that message came. And there was no more hope of seeing him at Christmas. There was no hope of seeing him again. The message came, and for me, it was as good as hearing he had already passed. I would never see him again. When I left, he told my mom, "This might be the last time I see Adam." When she told me, I said, "Maybe. We just don't know, I guess." But deep down, I had believed he wouldn't go so quickly. My mom told me he was outside in his Hoveround, washing the side of the house a few days before, and when I had left, he seemed to be able to walk farther and farther using his walker. On good days, he had been able to stand himself up.

Ever see a guy in a Hoveround spray a house
with a high powered hose? It's a sight to behold.

He passed only a few hours after my sister's message. And this time I wasn't in New York but in Colombia. I felt so selfish and so helpless. Selfish for being here when maybe I should be there and helpless that so far away, there was so little I could do. I've been trying to teleport for years (don't ask) and that would have been the perfect moment for a break through. But alas, this is real life: I don't have mutant powers, teleportation is not (yet) possible, and when people die, they don't wake back up. I left to Indiana a few days later.

I spent a week in Indianapolis. After a twenty-two hour door-to-door trip, I arrived home, stayed up with my mom talking way past bedtime, and the next day we had to be at his visitation. When I saw his body, I went into a state of shock and disbelief, which dammed up my emotion and isolated me from feeling the emptiness of the house without him in his bed in the family room, without his wisecracks and wit, without the constant stream of Cops and People's Court on the television. And that shelter of emotional dysfunction is where I stayed until the funeral, when the fact was no longer deniable, when I had to face that Walt was gone.

I'll miss you.

Click here to read his obituary.

Traveler's Manifesto

"Peculiar travel suggestions are
dancing lessons from God."
- Kurt Vonnegut

So this week I've decided to take a break from Fulbright related things and talk about travel in general. Last week I got back from a bit of an adventure I've been wanting to do for years. I left Thursday morning straight from work to Penn Station and rode to Washington DC to visit my friends Mike Davis and Jose Neuman and met his friends Adrian Moncini and Brandon Fitzgerald. From there I went to Chicago on a night train. I was supposed to leave at the end of the day to go to Indianapolis, where I'm from, but my friends Marko Loncar and Paul Helfen convinced me to stay a bit longer and I left by bus next day. (Big shout out to Amtrak who refunded my full ticket on such short notice!) Then I relaxed in Indianapolis staying with my sister, Samantha; her boyfriend, Danny; and their kids, Jada and Eric. I also reconnected with my friend Luisanna Rodriguez (who I met in high school Spanish and have stayed friends with since) and met her friends Daniel Gillespie and Paul Levy, who are now my friends too. In addition to, of course, visiting my mom, her husband, and some other family.

As you might be able to sense by now, I love meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends while traveling. I even met up with Aleks Sierakowski, who I met at last year's American Literary Translators Association conference in Bloomington, Indiana, and met his friend M Echeverria. On the train, I had interesting conversations with my next door neighbor, a cute construction worker from Wisconsin who talked like he was from Michigan; some moms on their way back from acting as chaperons on a middle school DC trip who I sat with in the dining car that night after they learned I could understand what they were saying in Spanish; and I had the bizarrely pleasurable experience over-hearing a lesson from what can only be described as the Hispanic Sarah Connor on how to select and grip throwing knives. You see, these strangely beautiful things never happen when you stay inside your house. The world has such amazing things to experience if you only just show up to them. Everyone has a nugget of truth and wonder, a piece of existence’s beautiful tapestry that they’ll willingly show you if you're open to it. These are the things that recharge me when I’m feeling a bit drained, when my job wears on me, when life has stopped being a series of discoveries and has turned into a monotonous grind.  Speaking of grind, here’s some footage of me from the security cameras at work:

I saw museums that taught me about Africa and the ice age, ate some of the best vegetarian food I've ever had at the Chicago Diner, waxed nostalgically over Spanish tapas for my days in Madrid, got sloshed on margaritas with my family, and read a bedtime story to my niece, none of which does my life permit me to do on a regular basis. It reminded me how important travel is to me, and so without further ado, I give you mon petit manifeste du voyage:

Traveler's Manifesto

This is a statement,

simple and direct:

An object at rest stays at rest,

and an object in motion remains in motion,

until some outside force acts upon it.

We’re born in motion,

entering life like an arrow loosed from the bow,

and over time, things stop us:

air resistance, friction, social mores and others’ expectations.

They tried to stop the nomadic Natives;

they tried to stop the moving sands

with grasses that root in the dunes.

They tried to put us in boxes:

houses, fences, cubicles, personality types and mortgages.

This is not without its merit,

but we should never forget

that no form of growth is without some form of motion, movement.

And that standing water often breeds disease and stagnation.

So, please, go, go, go!

because you’ll never learn anything till you see what you’re missing.

And now, I'll leave you with this, a song about people traveling on the back of a whale to different places and having adventures. (If you have this whale’s number, please send it my way!)