The Traveler's Tale

So, I have been encouraged by many people to start a blog, or, as I like to say it, my blog-pressure has been rather high of late. For those of you wondering, that will likely be the quality of joke you get by reading this blog. Hopefully at least a few people will enjoy themselves.

As for the name of the blog, for a year and a half I have been living alone in New York City and Bonn, Germany, both of which are mainly walking cities. Certainly they both have public transportation, but as I am somewhat impatient and in relatively good health, if I do not need to wait for a bus or a train, I will not. Some argue that for Bonn at least I should get a bike. However, as things tend to be stolen from me in Europe, I figure it is not worth the hassle only to have one more thing taken from me. In New York, I happened to be in a cab that collided with a cyclist, which was reason enough for me to keep pounding the pavement there. So, I walk everywhere, at times for up to 2 hours per day. Sometimes this leaves me feeling like the slightest movement would be painful, and yet sometimes I feel like stasis is extremely painful. Consequently, the fact that many American cities are rather pedestrian unfriendly has been made rather evident upon visits to see my wife in Durham, NC or various family members in Oklahoma and Southern California. Anyway, I have become rather used to depending only on my feet and will to get me somewhere, so living otherwise seems rather odd at this point.

As for the topics my blog posts will likely cover, fear not as I do not intend to discuss only walking. Living alone in a foreign country simply provides a person with a great deal of time to think, whether it be while walking about, reading in bed or simply eating dinner. Each activity is filled with an inherent loneliness and over time the wish to connect to someone takes an overwhelming amount of that time. I am not ashamed to say I have probably developed rather unnatural fondness for various figures from literature over the past 18 months, but each of those characters provided me with friendship and insight for the short time I got to know them in the pages I read. So, this blog will be a way for me to connect to those I love and maybe even a few strangers without having the ability to communicate in the way I would necessarily like all the time. Many posts will be about various adventures I have in my travels, some posts might be about walking and some posts will simply be random musings from a lonely, somewhat tired traveler.

In that regard, I recently returned to OK to attend my cousin Allison's wedding.

(Me, Allison and our cousin Michael)

The event itself was great and, as she could easily be considered my oldest friend, being there meant a great deal to me. However, due to flight complications as tend to happen every single time I leave Europe (the first time I was 20 and having never really traveled on my own before was having a nervous breakdown, the second time I was 24 and threw my back out on a 4 hour flash tour of Athens during a layover, the third time I was 27 and my plane caught fire, and now the fourth time at 28 I showed up at an airport booked on a non-existent flight with a non-existent airline, finally got rebooked but wound up spending the night on a bench in London's Heathrow airport) and a short turn around, I was rather exhausted upon returning home. It made me think about a book I once read (for those of you expecting greatness here, it was an enjoyable and highly readable William Gibson sci-fi novel, but not what I would call great literature) where a woman was required to travel often and proposed that long trips require one to unravel their soul behind them, which it then takes time to regather. For me, this seems rather apt. Having just left behind some good friends in Sicily ...

(The Sovich Family on Christmas Morning)

(A day in Siracusa with the Sovich family)

who I visited for Christmas, I went off to see pretty much my ENTIRE family at a wedding.

(The immediate family)

(Me, with my wife Amber, our dog Mindy and my grandparents)

Four days later, I hopped on a plane back to my dorm room-esque apartment in Bonn. I think it takes one time to mourn the loss of even small, unspoken interactions with those you love and the feeling of familiarity you have with a place you have at any time called home. Then, it takes more time to figure out how you fit in with your new surroundings, responsibilities and acquaintances. Bonn is somewhat familiar to me now, but it is still somewhere I live alone, so the loss of family and physical contact with those I love takes time to get over. However, I have made some good friends here and learned a bit of German, both of which I hope to do more of before I leave. Fortunately, the experiences one has when faced with new challenges and ideas tend to be rather fulfilling and soul-affirming. So, I just keep walking and living, trying to get some work done and learn a few things about the world, myself and math along the way. Even though I may have parts of my soul and soles spread all over the world at this point, it seems that both are renewable resources.