When I finished my favorite book for the first time, I wrote myself a note on the last page in purple pen:
It's March 13th 2003 and I will go to San Sebastian before I am old to escape my problems.
I was seventeen when I wrote that, having fallen ass over teakettle (as my mother would say) for Hemingway’s writing when my American Lit class read The Sun Also Rises. I visualized “before I am old” as a period sometime in my twenties or thirties. It would be a time when I would be a Grownup: an older, confident version of myself who possessed stability, purpose, and means. I imagined myself walking around my life with a look on my face that indicated, quietly and unostentatiously, that I knew exactly what I was doing.
By now I’ve done a pretty good job of perfecting that look, but then, I’ve always been pretty good at bluffing.
Being a Grownup (capital G) kind of snuck up on me, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. During the wintery months of my first job out of college, I became one of those “head down” people, literally and figuratively. Gone was the intoxicating self-confidence of the undergrad, and my adult confidence was nowhere in sight. I had pictured it so carefully—this could not possibly be it. Where was that look I had so been looking forward to? The self-assuredness?
Little did I realize at the time that being a Grownup isn’t primarily a function of attitude or facial expressions. It’s the grubby day-to-day of paying rent, making dinner, and doing one’s best to confine one’s tantrums to one’s own apartment (hopefully with the door closed).
On most week days during the Great Rude Awakening, I never really walked. I either plodded or scurried. I worked in an environment where nothing I did was ever right or correct—never entirely. It was the perfect recipe for a drink called something clever like “Emotionalatov Cocktail” or “Secretary Kamikaze”:
Take one lifelong straight-A student (this ingredient also contains a shaky baseline of self-confidence and thrives on adult approval). Scrape down what remains of her undergrad self-confidence (brutal job market works just as well as a lemon zester). Pour in one job, containing three supervisors, none of whom practice positive reinforcement of any variety and two of whom practice emotional abuse of several varieties. Add copious amounts of bourbon. Let sit for several months. First ingredient will slowly dissolve.
During one of those months, in which I felt like I was in fact dissolving a little every day, I happened to glance in the window of a bookstore as I scurried by. I stopped dead in my tracks and fairly sprinted through the door. There she was on the floor, without a care in the world: my new life line.
Her name was Ulla.
In addition to being a lifeline, Ulla was also principally a one-year-old golden retriever with a particularly laidback attitude. As I came to understand later, I was not the first person to come tearing through the door at the sight of the puppy. She may actually be one of the most brilliant sales tactics I have ever witnessed. What I didn’t realize at the time was how effective she really was.
Ulla belonged to the owner of the bookstore, which happened to be a travel bookstore called The Globe. Periodically, I would find myself dissolving a little faster than usual and make my way back to Ulla’s doorstep. Here, finally, was something I could not possibly screw up: rubbing a puppy’s belly. Her thumping tail was all the positive reinforcement I needed, and she filled the dog-shaped void in my heart, since I was in no position to own a dog myself. Eventually, as I scrubbed on her head or scratched her behind the ears, I looked up and started to notice my surroundings. The cover art of the books was enough to spike my adrenaline: Turkey, New Zealand, Spain, Thailand, Germany—books showing me not only the places I had always wanted to visit, but also what I would see when I got there, and perhaps some suggestions on where to eat.
It’s a little weird to pull up Google and type in “map of Europe.” I had a general sense of the geography, but now, sidling up to the idea as if moving too quickly would scare it away, I wondered—hypothetically—if one could realistically hit a handful of cities in one week. And which cities? In how many countries? On what trains? Staying in which hotels?
You know. Hypothetically.
What started as a purely hypothetical exercise quickly evolved into something more substantial when I got one of my best friends on board. We mutually agreed on some combination of Spain and France, but couldn’t quite find the right variation on an itinerary, swapping around foreign cities like puzzle pieces we were trying to fit together:
Paris. Bordeaux. Provence. Nice. Madrid. Barcelona.
San Sebastian.
The moment I realized that we could make a realistic constellation between Barcelona and Paris, with a stop in San Sebastian right in the middle, it was like the cosmos had suddenly, miraculously realigned, and somehow, I was back on track.
I headed to Ulla’s bookstore shortly thereafter and started buying maps.
Seven months later, I watched a dense bank of fog creep in over the tarmac as I waited for my flight at Logan. I was, in theory, flying out in less than an hour on the edge of a hurricane that had decided (with terrible timing, in my opinion) to barrel up the east coast that day. In my mind, this whole exercise was still not real; it was still a hypothetical. It was surprisingly hard for me to believe that in several hours I would be walking down Las Ramblas rather than heading back to work. Oddly enough, in the intervening months between my San Sebastian revelation and the flight that would get me there, I had managed to find a new job, one that in no way resembled a “Secretary Kamikaze.” The daily life I thought I would be fleeing actually wasn’t so bad—it was, in fact, quite good. But my months of scurrying, head down, had become a habit, and I still had a sinking feeling that this whole thing—the new job, the cool trip—would blow up in my face.
And so it was that I sat in my window seat, all bemused and amazed, as that plane hauled itself out of the soup ten minutes ahead of schedule. When the flight attendant came down the aisle, I skipped my usual seltzer and went straight for champagne. I felt that when the universe really does pull you through, it doesn’t hurt to stop and make a toast in her honor.
Several hours and one connection later, I landed in Barcelona under a cloudless sky.
A few days after that, in San Sebastian, I followed Hemingway’s directions with an almost religious zeal: walking “around the harbor under the trees to the casino [now a government building]” to a café in the cool shade. And I “sat out on the terrace and enjoyed the fresh coolness in the hot day, and had a glass of lemon-juice and shaved ice and then a long whiskey soda. I sat… for a long time and read and watched the people and listened to the music.” (Actually I had a lemon ice, which is the closest I could get, and a whiskey with Pellegrino, fun to act out in broken Basque.)
Back in high school, something about The Sun Also Rises chapters in San Sebastian and Jake’s short break from his insane, mundane, hurtful reality, had tugged on me in a way that was very personal. The promise I signed in purple pen, the deal I made with myself, was that someday I would be able to walk away, if only briefly, from a disappointing everyday life, the one that I always imagined a little differently, high school or otherwise. By the time I got to that café, I wasn’t so much walking away from something as sitting down and marking a moment of intense, exactly perfect happiness. I had literally owed it to myself, because after all, I had made a promise.
Later that evening, before we went for dinner by the water, I pulled out my Hemingway and wrote a new note below my old one:
It's September 7th 2010 and I am in San Sebastian, escaping fewer problems than I thought, but ecstatic to be here nevertheless.
A few days after I got home, I went back to the bookstore to see Ulla, the best sales dog in the world, who had reminded me that there were in fact some things I couldn’t screw up and some things—like a trip to San Sebastian—that I could get incredibly right.
I was talking to the salesperson as my eyes drifted over some new potential adventures, and she asked me what had inspired me to go.
“Hemingway,” I replied. I squatted down next to the dog to get a better belly-rubbing angle. “Well, Hemmingway and Ulla.”
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