Guest Author - Patricia Perkins

My blogging buddy Fred is in a dither because he signed up to go to a writing workshop and now the trip is upon him.

"I'm distracted," he writes,"by the fact that a week from today, my truck will contain everything I need to write, hike, photograph, play music, stay reasonably clean and clothed, sleep, and read. Seemed like a good idea to sign up for something like this back in the summer when I was full of enthusiasm.

"'Sure, go on, I'll be fine,' said Ann [his wife].

"But the woodstove will have to be tended every day before work and she'll be scraping ice off her car in the dark. She will have to feed and walk the puppy an hour before daylight while I am away.

"I'm distracted with this glorified camping trip I'll be embarking on. I'm feeling both guilty and excited about my trip but right now, a week before I leave, more than a little unsettled and scattered. Maybe later today the fog will clear. And maybe a nap will help."

I diagnose all this flapping and head-scratching as About-To-Leave-Itis. It doesn't matter whether I'm leaving for a week or for the summer. Just before every trip, I'm all catterwhomple with scattered ideas, excuses for abandoning the project, tugs and ties to home and hearth. There's always guilt. (How can I just leave all my friends? all my projects? my house?) There's always sly excitement as I peer over the fence at a life that has none of my inconveniences. Which brings up more guilt.

Are you making lists? I asked Fred. I usually have three or four: the list of loose ends, the list of bring-withs. Also, there are parts of my life that I've left suspended that just auto-erase when I'm gone. So I list them, the better to pick up my life when I get back.

In spite of my listmania, I forget the most obvious necessities--a sharp knife for a camping trip, a washcloth for a European hosteling trip, soap or hand lotion or fingernail clippers. The summer of '02, I needed an emery board in Estonia and couldn't find anything under $5.

In the midst of the lists, the phone calls, the interim piles of possible necessities, I lack resolve. I'm not clear-eyed and methodical. If I were guiltless, resolved, firm of purpose and steady, I would be callously rejecting my real life, admitting I don't care, saying to my friends and family that they don't matter. But I do need to put them all behind me, don't I, at least for the duration of the trip? How else can I suck the marrow out of the trip?

Leaving Time used to have its consolations. I once believed that all my Life Problems solved themselves as if by miracle just before every long trip, just to convince me that I didn't really need to travel. I'd find a new best girlfriend, a love interest who might be The One. I'd get job offers. Houses I'd dreamed of renting would come on the market. It had to be a life-changing long trip, say, a year. And I had to be committed to leaving for these major miracles to materialize; no half-hearted feints would work. I thought I was the only one to have this secret insight until I met a woman who had almost moved away from her home town three times, hoping to find a mate. Finally, she told me, she DID move, and he DID appear, but now he lived four hours away, back in her home town.

Now, happily married, living in my retirement house, befriended on all sides and around the world by great folks, I don't need Leaving Magic any more. And so, perhaps for that reason, I don't get any. I still go crazy though. Just like Fred, I hyperventilate for at least a week.