A BRIEF DETOUR

            Rarely do I fall for people in narratives. Nor do I ever want to delve deeper into the character of the people in stories read for recreation. But, on a recent detour from the rigid structures of my academic writing, I indulged in a leisurely stroll into the memoir of a dramatic writer, who walked me through her love affair with a man seventeen or eighteen years her senior and did just that. I also discovered something else: that my life was marginally woven into theirs, a serendipitous discovery that filled me with a sense of wonder equivalent to seeing the incandescent blues and purples of the aurora borealis on a winter evening, a shooting star against the black curtain of night, the sensation of walking through fields of molten, oozing lava, and the first inhalation of an early, mid-autumn, dewy morning in the Catskills.    

            Out of her personal accounts in this coming-of-age experience arose more questions regarding the significance of this relationship to the materialization of the memoir. I wanted to know more about him, her lover, namely the parts of their connection that were selectively left out, but would have explained the true reasons behind the demise of the relationship and the reasons he didn’t want to resuscitate it. What was it about him that caused her to give up control of her life and give it to him, to simply relinquish the progress she had initiated towards her future? Why did the outcome of this relationship trigger a revisiting of her past; what was its significance to the emotions she had suppressed in the cellars of her deeper past across the Pacific Ocean? And, more important to the life choices she made, what was it about the indentations of her life in the Louisiana wetlands that caused her to keep distancing herself from her adopted home, despite the obvious caring she received from those with whom she was most familiar? I hoped the reasons were to find her higher self (in the form of Eat, Pray, Love) rather than to be with love so that she could feel she belonged to someone. The selfish, Asian-American feminist side of me wanted her path to be self-chosen for discovering the Self, building her character, and awakening to her true north.     

            As people with questions do, I researched, pausing from my academic books and journal articles to delve further into these two people. The identity of the lover, the letters of his name and the cadence of its pronunciation, were familiar to me. After more digging, I soon learned that a book had been written about the rise of the company he brought to life, a book that simultaneously opened the doorway into the person behind the name in this memoir: his working class history and his restless spirit, which I suspected were the flames beneath his entrepreneurial diligence; that his motivations were the result of this profound responsibility to his family, his ties to his friends, the people who were good to him; that he had taken himself to task more than once to meet his responsibilities and to give generously to those important to him. As a published cookbook later revealed, this connoisseur of a beloved Mediterranean fruit (found in probably every Mediterranean kitchen) was a willing and earnest student of this ingredient. As the co-author of this same cookbook, he showed that he was also a soulful writer, having penned simple, yet meaningful statements, such as “At my table there are old friends . . . He loves to come into the cellar to help me choose my wines, talking the while of all the steps involved in making the day’s dessert. Then everyone gathers at the table to enjoy the Mediterranean cuisine, enriched with the stories and comments of everyone present.”

Surprisingly, I also learned that this lover and I had quite possibly crossed paths several years previously in a Sydney cafe, while I was in between farm work during my summer break. Though the memory is now hazy, the expression on his face in a photo image, angled in a certain way, brought me back to that day by the window, when the sun shining on his face brought to mind the adventurous Huckleberry Finn, a character brought to life by Mark Twain, but the way I imagined the adventurous Huck Finn to be in his early 40s.

As for her, the memoirist, I learned that she had fashioned her life after him. Although now living apart from him, she had nevertheless navigated her life to remain in his shadow – right down to the cookbook she is writing and expecting to publish in 2014. Disappointingly, I discovered that she is a modern day Camille Claudel to her Rodin. In this, I interpreted her actions as having run away from herself all those years. Perhaps she is still.  

So, I allowed myself this daydream into their life stories, completely unrelated to my graduate readings, and discovered that I yearned for quality, platonic companionship and harbored poems in the recesses of my heart. I returned from this detour and finished the research proposal, improved my initial three chapters, reviewed and completed writing the questions of my surveys and interviews, and revised and read for my chapter 5 . . . with my feet firmly planted on the ground.