Love at the Speed of Email (5 page)

Dad is typically the soft touch in our family. He is prone
to excessive guilt regarding any issue remotely related to inherited physical
challenges or to emotional scarring that may have been caused by our
peripatetic upbringing. This makes him good for all sorts of things from
prescription glasses, to phone cards that facilitate our staying connected to
friends worldwide, to family-funded credit cards to be used in case of an
emergency, to sneakers.

Come to think of it, I’m not exactly sure
why
he continues to buy all of us
sneakers at regular intervals, but it’s very nice of him.

Mum is more pragmatic and less indulgent. She says that none
of us would trade our childhood international experiences no matter what they
have cost us and suggests that since we are all now past our mid-twenties,
perhaps it’s time we kids started buying our own expensive sneakers.

This is why I was surprised when it was Mum who began
casually dropping the phrase
come home
into conversations. If I came home, she said, she’d help me look for another
job and buy me furniture and fly me up to
Ballina
for
the odd holiday.

I wasn’t using all that psychology education to counsel, but
I hadn’t forgotten my thorough grounding in trend analysis. I figured that it
was only a matter of time before the stakes in the “come home” campaign
escalated, but nothing had prepared me for what she flippantly said one night,
right in the middle of a completely unrelated discussion.

“If you came home,” Mum said, “we could get you the house
across the road. It’s for sale. It’s got forty acres, two waterfalls and a
spectacular view. It’s a writer’s paradise, and you could walk over and have
breakfast with us.”

“How much is it?” I asked.

“$770
,000
,” Mum said.

There was awed silence. I think even Dad was taken aback.

“Pocket change,” I said.

Dad snorted.

“What else?” I asked, teasing back. “I’m getting out of bed
to get a pen and I’m writing this down so that I can consider the offer
carefully tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d call it an
offer
exactly,” Mum said, backpedaling.

“You clearly said, ‘We could get you,’” I said.

“That’s right,” Dad said, joining in on the fun. “I was a
little surprised, but that is what you said.”

“Fine,” Mum said, clearly figuring that if she was in for a
penny she may as well be in for $770,000 plus some extras. “What else? There
are stables. I’ll throw in a couple of horses.”

“It sounds perfect.” I said. “I think you should buy it now.
That way it’ll be there for me when I come home in two years.”

San
Diego, USA

The thing is, almost six months after my thirty-first
birthday, more than four years after I moved to L.A.
,
I was surprised to find that my two-year timeline had shifted with me. When
asked, I was still saying I could see myself staying here “about two more
years.” Yet I was also still tempted to abandon current realities and follow
the lure of the unknown toward possibility and trust that little voice that
whispered to me of greener pastures elsewhere, of love that surely must be
waiting just across the next ocean, of happier alternate lives.

One Saturday morning I talked this over with two of my
closest friends in California, Erica and Leah.

If you had seen the three of us that morning sipping lattes
around a small table adorned with blue and yellow print, eyeing the pastries
while the trams rattled past, you might have thought we were in Fontainebleau
or Melbourne. Either would have been a good guess. The dark-eyed waiter spoke
with a French accent. All three of us spoke with Australian ones. Not much
about the scene spelled San Diego, but that’s where we were.

Two traveling husbands spelled girls weekend away. And
girls
weekend away spelled breakfast out. And while you
might have thought a Saturday breakfast would spell sleepy chatter about our
families, our men, or our plans for the day, it didn’t. It meant focusing on
the one topic we all needed to debrief before we could wander along the marina
or through Little Italy or into the lingerie store (where I would later dust
myself and whoever was standing nearby with body glitter and then find the
scented candles and wonder how I could go about getting paid to come up with
advertising phrases like “The spicy allure of warm blackberries suggests
languid summer love in the grass”).

No, before the marina and Little Italy, and definitely
before body glitter and languid summer love in the grass, we needed to talk
work.

This took a while.

Leah is a composer. She was finishing up a year as a
Fulbright scholar, negotiating a music licensing contract in the states, and
discussing projects on the home front with her Australian agent.

Erica is a scientist at UCLA’s Cousins Center for
Psychoneuroimmunology
. She focuses on cancer and stress,
and since her field is so specialized that it doesn’t exist in my
spell-checker, I’m not sure why I’m still surprised when Erica says things like
“Next week I really need to order the primers of metastasis-related genes to
test timing effects of
nadolol
,” and I really don’t
have a clue what she’s talking about.

When it was my turn to update the others on the last week, I
led off with “I’m in the middle of launching a global program called CARD –
Counselors Assisting Relief and Development – to register mental health
professionals worldwide who are interested in working with humanitarian
workers.” Then I sighed and told the whole truth. “It might sound glamorous, but
it mostly comes down to a lot of emailing.”

I thought about the previous week and sighed again.

At times my job could certainly bring adventure, but what I
didn’t talk about nearly as often were the weeks when I did little more than
write emails. Emails to the keynote speakers for the symposium I was organizing
in Baltimore.
Emails to the Kenya program trying to get them
to confirm workshop dates for October.
Emails to the Ghana program
seeking same.
And, that week, an endless stream of emails to
publicize the existence of CARD.

Erica and Leah would have cheerfully listened to me describe
what spending the week sending emails had been like. They would have asked
intelligent questions about the programs and how I was structuring my day to
help me stay focused and motivated. But it was Saturday morning. Suddenly I
didn’t want to whine about emails. Suddenly I didn’t even want to
think
about emails.

“What would you do if you weren’t doing what you’re doing?”
I asked them instead. “I mean, if you were living an alternate life, what would
you do?”

I don’t know what I expected them to say, but it certainly
wasn’t something quite so sensible.

“Maybe I’d teach,” Leah said.

“I could be a consultant,” Erica said. “No more lab coats.
Bring on suits and high heels. What about you?”

“I’d own a pizza shop in
Ballina
near Mum’s and Dad’s place,” I said.

Erica and Leah did not laugh. They did, however, look at me
in a way that made it clear they weren't sure whether I was serious or joking
and would suspend all judgment until they figured that out.

“Okay,
not a pizza shop
, exactly,”
I said. “An Italian restaurant with white linen tablecloths, a wood-fired oven,
and tall candles lodged in wine bottles. The scent of fresh garlic bread would
season the air while my customers dined on homemade pumpkin ravioli in a sage
and brown butter sauce.”

I was making myself hungry, no small feat considering I had
just polished off two crepes slathered in
nutella
. I
wondered if it would be bad form to lick out the
nutella
pot.
Probably.
I swiped the edge of it with my finger
and licked that instead.

I think about alternate lives a lot. Growing up, I spent
days on end pretending I was an orphaned English child being raised as a Hindu
Indian Princess, a child who would eventually be rescued by a dashing British
soldier after the aged (and impotent) bridegroom whom I had been forced to wed
at the age of thirteen suddenly died and I was expected to follow custom and
immolate myself on his funeral pyre.

This is another one I blame on my parents. They’re the ones
who gave me the thousand-page novel
The
Far Pavilions
to read when I was nine.

At thirty-one, however, my fantasy selves tended to live in
two rather divergent worlds. Down one path lay khaki pants, orphanages, and
refugee camps in Africa. Down the other lay fresh pasta and an Italian
restaurant in a small sugar-cane farming town in Australia, a place where I
could eventually get to know half of the people in town, where making bread
dough would substitute for hours on a computer, and where the saddest stories
I’d hear would usually be on the evening news.

I am fully aware that by living in L.A. and working with a
nonprofit, I am daily living out other people’s alternate-life fantasies. But
that doesn't negate the fact that the basic economic principle of opportunity
cost holds just as true in relation to the wealth of time as it does for money.
By choosing this, I am giving up other lives – different lives that would shape
a different me.

Some of those alternate lives are easy to pass up. I mean,
who in her right mind would really risk being burned alive on the funeral pyre
of her deceased husband in India? However, some aren’t so easy to pass up. Not
living in a small country town (regardless of whether my mother is right and
I’d go stir crazy in six months) is costing me a whole different set of
experiences, relationships, and life lessons.

Robert Frost took the road less traveled and it made all the
difference for him, but even if he’d choose it again without hesitating, I’d
wager he wondered about that other path occasionally.
 

As we spent four hours crawling up the freeway on Sunday
afternoon on our way back to L.A., Erica and I had plenty of time to wistfully
contemplate other paths, paths free of millions of other cars carrying people
who’d apparently also gotten the idea that San Diego was the place to go that
weekend. Roads way less traveled had rarely looked so good, and Erica circled
back around to this topic.

“What keeps us doing what we’re doing then?” Erica asked.
“Because all three of us could live those alternate lives.”

She was right. Leah could teach, Erica could consult, and I
could own a restaurant. Those two, at least, would be very good at their
alter-lives. So what kept Leah scoring music, Erica separating cells, and me
writing emails during weeks or even months when it just wasn’t much fun? What
made us choose this path and stick to it for years?

What drives any of us to stick with something for years when
it's not a constant carnival?
For many, a need to pay the rent
and eat, clearly.
But that's not all. Few of us who live in the Western
world
must
do exactly what we do to
feed and clothe ourselves. Many times our career choices are really more
influenced by a cocktail of duty, fear, apathy, talent, priorities, and
passion. Alternate lives, at least one or two of them, often lie within reach.

“What keeps me here?” I repeated. “I feel as if I wandered
onto this path and I’m never quite sure it’s the right one for me to be on. But
I think it almost helps to know that I have other options I
could
pursue if I chose to. That
steadies me. It helps me say: ‘For better or for worse.
For
adventure or for email.
For now.
I chose
this.’”

“How long do you think you’ll keep choosing this?” Erica
asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I still can’t see myself here long
term – L.A. is not my home. But I love my job, I’ve got good friends here, and
perhaps for the first time in my life, I’ve decided that I need a better reason
to leave than an intangible restlessness and the sense that I don’t quite
belong.”

This resolve to fight the restlessness and ignore the
temptation of other paths was a huge paradigm shift for me. It was also a
decision that would shortly be tested. Barely two months after this
conversation with Erica,
a stranger’s email would
startle me into wondering whether that better reason to leave might have just
landed in my inbox.

Los
Angeles, USA

I was at Erica’s house when the letter arrived.

We were all still in our pajamas at 9 a.m. I was at the
kitchen table on my laptop. Leah was lying flat on the floor in the long ray of
sunshine falling through the bay window. Erica was rinsing coffee mugs and
trying to talk us into finding the energy to go to the L.A. farmers market.

“Huh,” I said when I opened the email.

“What?” Erica asked when I didn’t say anything else.

“This guy,” I eventually answered, still scanning down the
page. “There’s this guy in Papua New Guinea, and he’s just sent me a really
long letter.”

Leah lifted her head off the floor and raised an eyebrow.

Erica wasn’t amused either.

“New Guinea? Where do you find these people?” she asked.

“Hey!” I said, deciding the letter would keep for a while
and shutting down my computer. It was not the most sophisticated of comebacks,
but I wasn’t in any position from the little I’d read to argue that this letter
already felt different from some of the other missives I’d received since the
novel I’d finally finished had been published two months earlier.
 

“Have you heard from that other guy again?” Leah asked.

“Lust-thrust guy?”
I asked.

Lust-thrust guy was becoming a regular conversation topic
among friends. I was starting to regret having told anyone about him, but when
the first email arrived, I’d just been puzzled and amused by the opening
gambit. “I came across a pamphlet near my mailbox,” this stranger wrote, “and
while browsing through the book summaries your photo caught my eye. It was
love-phase-1 at first glance.”

Seriously?

No, seriously??

That was my reaction until the second letter arrived two
weeks later, after my first reading at a local bookstore.

The knowledge that he’d been in the audience gave me my
first shiver. The poem he finished his letter with gave me my second, and it
didn’t take more than the first two lines:

“Dust to
dust,
I wander in the lust,

You gave the dreams,
how about the thrust?”

I’d laughed about this with my friends.

But then the next letter, titled
Divine Chemistry
, arrived two weeks later.

Then another letter, two weeks after that.

And I stopped finding it funny.

I never answered any of these letters, and lust-thrust guy
eventually stopped writing to me. I, however, never quite stopped scanning for
his face in the audience whenever I did a local reading.
 

The letter I’d just received on that sunny fall morning was
different, though, I was sure. For one thing, I hadn’t seen any creepy rhymes
in my quick perusal. For another, I recognized his name – Mike had written to
me before. The previous Tuesday a note from someone named Mike who lived in
Papua New Guinea had dropped out of nowhere into my work email account, right
in the middle of a very busy day.

Atlanta,
USA

The seed of Mike’s first letter to me was planted not in
Papua New Guinea but in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, a stranger named Erin, an acquiring editor for a
magazine, had received a press release about my novel. As she scanned the
synopsis and my author biography, it wasn’t my book that had held her attention
– it was my day job as a stress-management trainer for humanitarian workers.
Erin thought of her old friend Mike, who was a humanitarian worker in Papua New
Guinea, and figured she should sign him up for the
Headington
Institute newsletter.
 

So Erin went to my writing website and looked for a link to
the
Headington
Institute. What she discovered first,
however, were my essays. Several essays later, Erin found that she wasn’t as
interested in hooking Mike up with the institute newsletter as she was in
hooking him up with me.

Yes, Erin acknowledged as she thought it through, the fact
that I lived in Los Angeles could prove to be a minor drawback. But she also
knew by now that I had grown up a country-hopping nomad. My upbringing, she
reasoned, had prepared me well for the challenging romantic equation she was visualizing.

As for Mike, as she told him months later, “I was so
overcome with giddiness at striking gold via one glossy sheet of press mess
that I had to brag to the people in the nearest three cubicles that I had just
found the perfect woman for my friend in Papua New Guinea.”

So Erin wrote to Mike that day and strongly encouraged him
to look at my website.

Mike rolled his eyes and wrote back to Erin. He lived in a
small town in Papua New Guinea with unreliable dial-up internet, he pointed
out. He wasn’t about to go browsing the website of a stranger living in L.A., a
stranger Erin wasn’t even sure was single.

Undeterred, Erin downloaded all the essays on my website,
compiled them into a sixty-page document and emailed it to Mike.

Mike groaned but, other entertainment options being in short
supply, started reading.

After he was finished, dial-up connection notwithstanding,
Mike visited my website. As the photo on my homepage slowly scrolled open, Mike
realized that he’d seen my face the week before, on the
Facebook
page of a friend he’d met six years earlier in Melbourne.

Mike decided to drop me a line.

Los
Angeles, USA

Mike’s first letter – a casual note
mentioning our mutual friend, Alison, and asking to be added to my email list –
hit my inbox in the middle of a less-than-placid day at work.

I didn’t have much time to pause and wonder how my essays
had found their way to a remote corner of Papua New Guinea, but I did snatch a
couple of minutes two days later to send a brief reply and, on a whim, a friend
request on
Facebook
. Mike’s thumbnail picture on the
site was so small I couldn’t really make out what he looked like, but when I’d
searched his name,
Facebook
had proudly informed me
that Alison wasn’t our only mutual friend.

Mike was also friends with Alison’s husband, Paul, and
several of Paul’s siblings. I’d gotten to know Paul’s family as a teenager when
both of our families had lived in Zimbabwe. Paul was my first real crush. At
fifteen, I was convinced I wanted to marry the brooding, mysterious
seventeen-year-old.

But Paul wasn’t even the weirdest thread in our tangle of
indirect connections.

Mike was also linked to another friend of mine, Ryan. Ryan
was living in Afghanistan and churning out raw and compelling essays of his own
when, completely infatuated with his writing, I first tracked him down via
email and pestered him until he gave in and agreed to be my friend.

But back to Mike.

Five days after Mike sent his first note.

Three days after I answered it.

The
letter – a
letter that showed me that he’d read my essays very carefully indeed – arrived.

Madang
, Papua New Guinea

Sunday,
October 21

From:
Mike Wolfe
 

To:
Lisa McKay

Subject:
A breath of fresh air

Hi Lisa,

It’s a partly cloudy
afternoon. As I sit at my dining room table, Ella Fitzgerald on iTunes is
competing with the upbeat Pacific rhythms coming from across the street. Our
neighbor across the fence is having some sort of public meeting in his
backyard, so every now and then fifteen men clap their hands enthusiastically.
We used to think the regular Saturday meetings were political in nature, but
the elections have come and gone and the men continue to gather. I’m a bit
curious. But getting the answer would require me not only to walk all the way
across the lawn, but also make the effort to introduce myself properly to the
man of the house instead of my normal practice of smiling and nodding at him in
the mornings when I jog by. Right now I just can’t be bothered to make that
additional effort.

So a dear friend in
Atlanta, Erin, compiled all your online essays into one compact document so
that I didn’t have to labor with my dial-up connection to read them.

I really enjoyed
journeying with you through your essays. I contemplated. I laughed. I
commiserated. I felt moved. I felt challenged. I felt comforted and consoled in
the way that one feels consoled when one reads that he is not the only being on
the planet who experiences being thirty-one and talented, and purpose-driven,
and questioning whether the road less traveled is worth the opportunity cost of
the greener grass on the other side of the fence. And whether it’s really worth
it, searching for goodness and hope in the midst of some shitty shit in this
world. And feeling crap about it all some of the time and feeling really joyful
sometimes, too. And being tossed around by vacillating feelings, and perplexing
questions, and unrealized hopes, and longing for things to be right (whatever
that means).
Also, longing for a nice big bowl of ice cream.
And a bottle of Barossa Shiraz shared with good friends.

Reading your essays
was a breath of fresh air to my spirit. Thanks.

It’s
kinda
funny that after journeying with you in your essays,
I feel like I know you. Which, of course, my non-psychology training tells me
is most likely me projecting my needs and wants onto another person.
Which is just oh
sooooo
helpful in life’s
various flavors of relationships.

Because allow me to be
straightforward here and say that I’d like to know more about Lisa McKay. I
feel like I know some of your personality,
but ??
You
have gorgeous eyes and a great smile. I even quite like your blue passport,
although I don’t need it. I already have my own blue American passport that
allows me to traipse all over the world. But I do love Australia.
 

Of course, I have some
trepidation as I write – “apprehension” or “misgivings” would work as well –
about whether it’s even worth it to expose oneself to the potential ordeals
that a relationship between LA and PNG would entail. My one data point of
experience in this long-distance relationship matter culminated in making a
phone call to Indonesia from Sri Lanka and having the woman I thought I may
just marry break up with me because she realized (correctly it turns out) that
it just wasn’t going to work for us.
Hence apprehensions and
misgivings.

Now this is all the
more crazy because Tuesday I’m heading out to spend the next two months in
Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, and most of my time will be spent in remote
villages without email and electricity (and perhaps even without Coca-Cola, but
I doubt it).
 

But hey, why shy away
from challenges?

So give it a think and
decide what you’d like to do. And drop me a line when you like. No worries.
Really.
Regardless of what you say, I’m not going to turn
into a Lisa stalker.

Acknowledging the
imbalance of information between us, I feel that I ought to (“ought” in the
non-guilt sense) share some Mike info. I used to be quite a regular mass
e-mailer once upon a traumatic first humanitarian posting in Central Asia.
Alas, my writing skills have atrophied over the years. I have but one mass
email from PNG that I’ve attached. And they say that a picture is worth a
thousand words. I don’t buy it, but I’ve also attached a link to the thirty
photos from thirty countries that I displayed at my 30th birthday party last
year.

Well, Ella has long
stopped playing, the meeting across the fence has ended and I’ve rambled for
quite a few paragraphs as I am prone to do. But I meant every word.

Drop me a line when
you like. No rush. And keep on writing. You’re quite good at it.

Cheers from PNG,

Mike

Los
Angeles, USA

I didn’t read this letter carefully until after I’d driven
home from Erica’s on Sunday afternoon. I will share most things with Erica and
Leah without hesitating, so I don’t know exactly what it was that made me flip
my laptop closed on that sunny fall morning in Erica’s kitchen and save Mike’s
letter for later.

Why, right from the start, did this letter seem different?

It wasn’t just that Mike said he liked my essays. Other people
had said they liked my essays, although few could relate the way he clearly
could.

Perhaps that was it, or part of it. The photographs he’d
sent made it clear that Mike had traveled the world during the last decade. I
suspected that anyone who could survive postings in Tajikistan, Uganda, Sri
Lanka, and PNG in short order was either seriously crazy or seriously
interesting. And given that the letter he’d attached about bush life in PNG was
relaxed, confident, and seasoned with
joie
de vivre
, I would have put money on seriously interesting.