Journal Entry #1142: My Way or the Hemingway
That day I booked the African adventure of a lifetime, and delivered a bunch of jewelry in NYC. Boring takes a detour through the ineffable. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
Dearest Road2Elsewhereians—
First of all, my apologies for spamming all of you on Saturday, July 22nd. I couldn’t figure out how to put four huge animation files (Space Needle flies! Seals bark! Clams spurt! Mt. Rainier takes umbrage!) into one post, so instead I put one animation into four separate posts. And then I actually sent all of them!On the same day! It caused twenty-three subscribers to run for the hills.
Ooops.
OTOH, it was also my second-biggest day of traffic ever, with 2,300 people clicking those links, so what the hell? It was the best of days, it was the worst of days..
Meanwhile…
For some time now I’ve been meaning to spelunk my daily journals for posts to run in this space.
For those of you joining in late, I’ve been keeping a daily journal…oh, since the beginning of time (October 12, 1978).
I wrote about it here.
I’ve now made journal entries for 16,000+ straight days, and recorded about six million words of experience, noticing, worry, and exhilaration. My journal is a great resource for my backward glances, and I want to tap it here—and add the illustrations that will provide hectoring commentary on who I was back then, and what I think of then-me right now.
Welcome to my recherche du temps perdu.
As Marcel Proust wrote: “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.” I have tried my best to live that advice from the madeleine-munching author of The Remembrance of Things Past, and my daily journal is the best reflection of my own devotion to—and failure to follow—Proust’s pointers.
Enough explaining. Welcome to my past. It’s prologue, you know.
TUESDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 1981
Today I made a $110.10 bet that I will be able to meet D and M1 in Nairobi at 10AM on December 29th.
All things considered, the bet seems rather a small one.
I was on the job at 10 o’clock this morning, and I worked for forty-five minutes at the gallery2 before I was dispatched to the post office. I had a pleasant walk across town, dealt with an extremely nice postal clerk, put a tracer on a package (results in four or five months), and returned to the shop. Now it was time for me to head downtown to the Jewelry District and do some pickups and deliveries on 48th, 47th, and 46th streets. The shops I visited were all a bit depressing, especially so an Indian shop, where I had to wait in a decompression chamber,
and a jewelry cleaner whose digs resembled the boiler room of a dirty submarine.
Still, I’m being paid for this.
After my deliveries were taken care of I stopped by Citibank to make some deposits, and then by Air France to book my flight to Africa through Paris.3 The woman there was very kind and helpful, phoning everywhere, getting information, discussing options, being pleasant. By the time I was ready to lay down the money I was in a flush of excitement, making me a bit giddy and trembly.
Too much to take, really.
I passed about ninety minutes at Air France, then I scooted back uptown to complete my workday at the gallery; the workday ended at 9:30pm. E [my friend] and LK [the owner of the gallery] were both very excited about my trip, and I was too excited to handle the prospect. The thought of actually seeing D and M in Nairobi, and traveling overland through Uganda to Zaire, seems impossibly wonderful—a justification for the expense in itself. I am thrilled by the whole plan.
I packed boxes with horrible ceramic bracelets until about 9:30, then E. and I stepped out for a drink. I was home at 11pm, made chili, fidgeted, grew highly anticipatory, listened to “HMS Pinafore,” and then hit the sack.
Ahoy, Afrique!
My friends were serving in the Peace Corps, in what we now think of as Congo. Back then it was Zaire, and my friends were operating a health clinic, to serve the local women and children, and a rabbit hutch, to serve local women and children dinner. Protein, you know. They were planning a holiday in Nairobi, and I hoped to meet them just after Christmas, 1981. Forty-two years have passed since then, astonishingly.
It was a fancy jewelry shop on Madison Avenue in New York, where the rich ladies would buy bracelets to rattle. My friend E hired me there, for an off-the-books job that paid an hourly wage, in cash, which supplemented my unemployment checks. I’d just lost my first journalism job, at a now defunct magazine about the future. How ironic! I immediately began plotting my escape to another continent. Hey, what’s the statute of limitations on unemployment fraud, anyway?
Ernest Hemingway’s first trip to Africa was a gift from his second wife’s wealthy uncle. They were planning to go big came hunting, but his first conquest was a major case of amoebic dysentery. He recovered in time to shoot this lion.
Sorry about that, Lion! On my trip, I didn’t shoot anything, including photographs. I was a writer, you see.
I've just started to dive into your R2E posts, Peter, and really enjoying them! Whimsy and introspection, one of my favorite combinations. And you writes gud, too...
Such a fascinating post - it's been wonderful learning more about your epic journalling practice over the years, Peter. Awesome!
And, for the record, I LOVED the quadruple-whammy of animated posts - thank you so much for every single one of them.