Walking Distance: Pilgrimage, Parenthood, Grief, and Home Repairs - Softcover

Hlavsa, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611861861 ISBN 13: 9781611861860

Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In the summer of 2000, David Hlavsa and his wife Lisa Holtby embarked on a pilgrimage. After trying for three years to conceive a child and suffering through the monthly cycle of hope and disappointment, they decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, a joint enterprise—and an act of faith—they hoped would strengthen their marriage and prepare them for parenthood.

Though walking more than 400 miles across the north of Spain turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated, after a series of misadventures, including a brief stay in a Spanish hospital, they arrived in Santiago. Shortly after their return to Seattle, Lisa became pregnant, and the hardships of the Camino were no comparison to what followed: the stillbirth of their first son and Lisa’s harrowing second pregnancy.

Walking Distance is a moving and disarmingly funny book, a good story with a happy ending—the safe arrival of David and Lisa’s second son, Benjamin. David and Lisa get more than they bargained for, but they also get exactly what they wanted: a child, a solid marriage, and a richer life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Hlavsa heads the Theatre Arts Program at Saint Martin’s University, where he has been teaching acting, directing, and playwriting since 1989.

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Walking Distance

Pilgrimage, Parenthood, Grief, and Home Repairs

By David Hlavsa

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2015 David Hlavsa
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61186-186-0

CHAPTER 1

In the summer of the year 2000, Lisa and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, more than four hundred miles across the north of Spain from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Shortly after our return, Lisa got pregnant. James was the only name we considered for a boy. Inasmuch as anything can prepare you for a birth, I suppose walking the Camino prepared us for his. And inasmuch as anything can prepare anyone, it prepared us for his death as well.

Unlike Everyman's decision to go on pilgrimage, ours was neither involuntary nor did it happen all at once. Its arrival in our lives was not particularly momentous. There was no vision, no visitation. Nobody fell off a donkey. One day, in the tenth year of our marriage, Lisa and I were baking on a beach in the Caribbean. White sand, palms, light breeze, turquoise water, eighty degrees. We had good jobs: I had recently received tenure as a theater professor; Lisa was bringing in good money as a yoga teacher. We had some savings and a small co-op apartment in a hip Seattle neighborhood. No more low-budget road trips, car camping, sleeping on college friends' couches, standby flights; these days, we could afford a real grown-up vacation.

The beach was full of sand fleas, and I was starting to burn. I'm not really a beach kind of person, and I hate being a tourist — a visitor, isolated, surrounded by the vibrant life of a tropical island with no real way to be a part of it. Vacations and holidays have always been restless times for me. Something in me says: Why vacate? Why go on a retreat? I don't want to retreat; I want to advance. Instead, there we were: beached.

Of course, vacation wasn't the problem; the problem was me. It wasn't just that I was bored; any time I wasn't at work, I struggled with a combination of low-level anxiety and depression, a slight but perceptible dissociation from my domestic life, as if I had been given a mild sedative and could never quite emerge fully from its speedy, torpid blur.

At work, which, for a teacher, is infinitely expandable, I had classes to plan, students to cajole, committees to chair, resources to marshal, artists to collaborate with, deadlines, challenges. Add to these preoccupations the cycle of producing plays: each new cast a community forged in the attempt to make something fine, each rehearsal period a brief lifetime unto itself, and each closing night the end of a world. It's not that I was always happy at work, but when you get in the habit of trying to fill the hole in your heart with professional achievements, if you're any good at what you do, there's always just enough of a kick to the workday to keep you coming back for more.

Lisa once said accusingly, "I think you like being at work a lot better than being at home." I thought about trying to reassure her that it wasn't so, but then I just nodded. She had me there.

During our courtship, I had wooed her with an old-fashioned fervor that, fortunately for me, she found charming — if sometimes a little overwhelming. Like a lot of men I know, I could be very good at the initial pursuit, but once I got the girl, I wasn't quite sure what to do with her. However hard I tried to be a good husband, it seemed there was always a part of me disengaged from the action of marriage, the shared effort of making a life together. I was at home at work and a tourist in my home.

I rolled over on my towel and muttered something to Lisa about wishing our time off from work had more of a sense of purpose.

Sometimes a simple remark just unfolds and unfolds. At first it looks like any other wrinkled scrap of thought. But then, as you smooth it out, it expands impossibly, all out of proportion. You want to see it in full, so you start to push other things aside to accommodate it. At first the unfolding seems like a game, an absurd magic trick, but then it takes up the whole room, and you stare at what's before you, stunned: you realize it's a map of the territory ahead.

I trace my very existence back to a simple remark. My parents were in college, still in their teens; my father, a tall, gangly, quiet kid who liked to play basketball as long as no one took the game too seriously, and my mother, curvy, dark-haired, intense in her convictions, were midway through a conversation about something else when he turned to her and, so the story goes, blurted out, "So, do you want to get married or not?"

So, having arrived at this very comfortable place in our lives, where did Lisa and I want to go from here, and what would make the journey more purposeful? When we got home from the Caribbean, we started to reconsider not just our vacation plans, but our destinations in general. Marriage, like pregnancy, is both an either/or proposition and a work in progress. How married were we? We both felt we could be more married. My tolerance for intimacy, for instance: Lisa opined that it might be a good idea for me to make some improvements in that area. And I replied that such an improvement should probably be accompanied by an expansion of Lisa's tolerance for, well, me — which, though it had markedly increased in recent years, was still, by my standards, far too limited.

Over the years, we had fought plenty, but clearly there were some battles we were avoiding. And we had decisions to make. Our childlessness, for example, was one indicator that our marriage could use some work — not the fact of childlessness itself, but our irresolution over it.

From the beginning, we had shifted back and forth about having a baby. On one of our first dates, we were sitting side by side on a park bench, and she said that she doubted she would ever want children. I understood that it was a casual remark — and I wasn't sure I wanted children either — but I didn't want to close off the option. So, rather than letting the remark pass, I told her that if she definitely didn't want children, I wasn't sure we ought to be seeing each other. Lisa looked a bit startled — after all, we barely knew each other — and then she moved a little closer to me on the bench. Sure I was a little goofy, but maybe I had potential.

By our midthirties, Lisa had changed her mind; she wanted a child, and soon. I didn't think I was ready. For one thing, though I had limited experience with them, I wasn't particularly keen on children. They seemed to like to climb on me, and I found that kind of flattering, but that didn't mean I wanted one. Lisa didn't push me. I pretended to be in the question for a while, but how do you make a decision like that? I could make a list of pluses and minuses, but who was I kidding? There was no way to make a rational determination. It didn't feel right to just say no, so I just said yes.

I'd said it on Maui, two years before, on another beach vacation, as Lisa and I stood on the summit of Haleakala, watching the sun rise from the ocean and set the volcanic moonscape below us on fire. I pictured myself with a child on my lap saying, "Junior, did I ever tell you about the moment you first became a gleam in your old man's eye?"

Later, as we were hiking down the slope of the mountain, Lisa slipped and cut her shin on the rough volcanic rock. She still has a bit of a scar — it looked as if she'd taken a large cheese grater to her leg. Though she made it to the bottom of the trail okay, her sock and sneaker were soaked with blood,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1611861861
• ISBN 13: 9781611861860
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 136
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar