PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE
10 June 2002 Monday
Encino California, USA:

On August 1, 1974, my wife and began a trip around the world that lasted almost a year. That day we flew from L.A. to Tokyo. We toured Japan, then went to Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt. We spent the winter in Europe, living near Paris, exploring France, driving through Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany. We then went to London, flew to New York and drove across the U.S. back to L.A.
Bea and I had married in 1973 after living together for two years. I turned 30 and Bea was close, and choices for “Life” were closing in. We were both working, she as a teacher in Burbank, I as a public defender, and some of our friends had begun an “adult” version of “Life”: they began collecting Things, bought houses, had children.

But Bea had introduced me to the concept that real Living could only be experienced fully while traveling to exciting places. She loved to travel, had been born in Russia and prized her “Russian soul.” She had spent her childhood in Paris until age 8 and had returned there several times to visit her uncle and cousin and to tour Europe; she had majored in, taught and spoke fluent French. At her urging, we chose foreign restaurants and foreign movie houses over the domestic. She convinced me that “real living” had to be done before “real life” began and trapped us beyond hope.

Some friends, couples from the public defender’s office, had spoken of their “sabbaticals” — travels around the world for a year — and the exotic places they had visited. These tales were related over dinners in their houses, which they now seemed content to occupy after having their adventures abroad.

Bea had distant relatives in Israel who we could stay with. A teaching colleague was now living in Greece with his daughter, teaching at the American Community Schools there. He offered to put us up while there. When Bea’s uncle offered us his “summer cottage” outside of Paris to stay in while in Europe, and warned that he planned to sell it in a year or two, it was now or never.

We contracted to buy a new Fiat to be picked up at the factory in Turin in November. We bought “round-the-world” airline tickets which permitted us to take an unlimited number of flights on any airline during the year, within certain limits of latitude, direction and mileage. We read as much as we could about the places that peaked our interest. We outlined a budget for food, lodging, sightseeing, gifts, souvenirs. We mapped out a route. We gave notice to our landlord, sold most of our furniture and the things we had accumulated in a garage sale.

On 1 August, 1974, Bea and I began the trip. It was planned to last a year, and did, almost. We began by flying to Tokyo and ended by flying from London to New York in May, and eventually driving across the country back to LA, where we bought a house, filled it with souvenirs from The Trip and resumed work.... Real life began. ... We inevitably involved ourselves with home, friends, and especially a child, all the essences of Life; and it was a good life after all, while it lasted.

Though we did travel again together for a short summer jaunt to France, and took many vacation trips with our son, The Trip was always our hallmark of memories. We often talked of re-visiting the most vivid exotic places we had seen. We never did. Bea became ill one Christmas vacation, and died sixteen months later,
April 18, 1992.

The notes that follow are from a journal I wrote contemporaneously with events. The book’s pages were 5" wide and 8" long, 26 lines each. Each night I wrote my reflections about the day’s events, trying to keep to a maximum of one page per day, because it was, after all, a “Daily Reminder 1974" calendar book issued each year in the LA Public Defender’s Office.

Some days were too full of thoughts and sights to cram onto one page. A few days required inserts of thin sheets of loose paper (mostly stolen hotel stationery), such as our first amazing day in Calcutta (22 August). A few days passed with so little occurring that I merely noted the passage of time. At other times, such as when I was too ill to write, I caught up by entering several days’ events in one sitting.

I wanted to do more than recite a travelogue of sightseeing impressions. Fancying myself a writer I tried to discipline myself by making each day’s entry a 26 line sketch, or short story like a sort of Haiku. Often, I tried to be too clever, too profound. Some of the entries are merely dear diary soul-searching ramblings, whining of an introspective lost boy.

If it seems that they are too full of negative complaints, blame it on my basically negative nature, which can find the flaw in any diamond. I needed the journal to vent, rant, whine about the obstacles we faced.

After some entries, I have included parts of letters which either Bea or I wrote to my brother Ron and sister-in-law Laura during our trip. They graciously saved them and returned them to us after we returned. The letters often supplement many of the experiences described in my journal. There are many references in the letters to Fred and Ginger, our cats which Ron and Laura generously agreed to keep in their house, along with their own two Siamese cats, Sherlock and Shadow.

I have also included some excerpts from letters Bea sent to me and those I sent to her during her trip to Europe in the summer of 1970. She had gotten her divorce; I had become a real lawyer, passing the Bar in June, working for the PD and finding my new apartment. Before the summer, we had been “involved” as our crowd used to say, but after our summer apart, things began to progress more rapidly as a result of our separate experiences, which these letters reveal.

I have edited the entries and letters as little as possible, except a few times for clarity when my grammar and shorthand which I resorted to in order save space now seem confusing. I have included some commentary in [] to supplement and explain some entries. I have left in some abbreviations I used, and expanded others. Mostly, I have left the entries as they were scrawled, grammatical warts and all.

Many of the earlier journal entries focus on more or less mundane observations about costs, lodging and travel modes. This is because one of our goals was to write a travel book that measured those we had relied on. We had bought several of the popular books like “Frommer’s Europe on $10 a Day” and its ilk. We carried them as a reference for each city to cheap hotels and restaurants, sights, oddities, etc. We also accumulated from other travelers both before and during the journey a trove of information about each place we might visit. Bea kept meticulous notes of such things for future reference, if only to assist other friends who might follow in our path.

We planned to and managed to avoid the luxury hotels and packaged tours most American travelers stick to while traveling in the Orient, Asia and even in Europe. We couldn’t have afforded them, but even if we could, it was not to be our style. Going on the cheap was a philosophy. Being “on our own together” was the goal. We would get to see more “real people,” get a far better understanding of the cities we visited, and gain confidence in ourselves. It sort of worked that way, though in the long run, it accelerated our fatigue, was often a source of friction between us, and eventually wore us down.

One of the laughable revelations in re-reading these entries so many years later is the incredible price inflation the years have brought. Our round-the-world-air-tickets were $1,500 each for seventeen (!) flights (including LA to Tokyo and London to New York) during the year. Our Fiat cost $3,500. Our daily budget in retrospect seems absurd: we tried to average less than $35 a day for everything: food, lodging, purchases, sights, so that our savings would stretch for the entire year. So we found hotels in Asian cities for $7 a night, meals for $2, and groaned when we felt fleeced by having to pay $14 to stay in a hotel. Ironically, the only cost that has not changed is gasoline, which in 1974 was between $1.40 and $2.40 per gallon, attributable to the gas shortage then gripping the world. When we returned, we bought our first home for $43,000, which seemed an enormous price at the time.

I am also struck by our preoccupation with weather. We knew that being in Asia in the Rainy Season and Europe in the winter would be problematic, but we had little choice; we thought that Asia should be first because it required the highest level of energy. We were right about that, but we severely underestimated the impact of the bad weather we would face all year. Our mood was so often dependent upon its vagaries: oppressive heat in Asia; cold, constant rain, snow in Europe. In Europe the winter never ceased, and we went in search of the sun finally finding it in Seville ... which so reminded us of LA that our chronic homesickness began to become unbearable.

It also reminds me about how often we suffered and complained of illness. Our frequent colds and tummy woes, probably exacerbated by the climate changes and exposure to new “bugs,” sapped our energies still further, contributed to our homesickness, the inevitable ennui, and put strains on our togetherness.

Our relationship was the most crucial of the elements that required adjustment.
On the very first day of the trip, we walked the crowded streets of Tokyo in excited awe for 12 hours. At one point, we bickered about something—I no longer recall what(probably my walking pace)—and the argument festered until Bea spat, “Don’t talk to me anymore!”

It was a common end to the first phase of many of our previous spats during the years we were learning to live together. Doors would slam, silence would follow, Bea would phone a friend to complain about my stubbornness, I would sulk before the t.v., time would drag, until eventually— the tearful confrontation, discussion, and finally, usually, resolution.

But now, I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked around. There were hundreds of strange faces and only one I recognized. “Who else am I going to talk to?” I whined.

We laughed and hugged. We realized then and there that if we were to survive the year alone together, we had to devise new rules.

Years later, we realized that all the other couples we knew who had traveled together on similar trips eventually separated. We came to understand why those other relationships eventually failed: the enforced closeness of the trip was equal to 10 years of a “conventional” marriage. The pressures were intense: 24/7 togetherness, hundreds of decisions to be made jointly, hours of tedium, fatigue, illness, aches. Being alone together was a crucible.

The differences in our personalities became exaggerated, minor annoying habits became intolerable irritations. We had to learn a new vocabulary for sensitivity to needs— needs for love, for privacy, for contact. We had to cultivate a knack for laughing at ourselves; and an appreciation for irony. We had to become closer than we ever would have been simply living together in an apartment or married according to the usual script. We learned when and how to trust, to rely, to avoid, to relax, to share. The hardest was to learn to patiently tolerate the things we didn’t like about one another and to respect our individuality. We argued, fought, sometimes seethed as couples always do. We stuck it out, but there were strong forces pulling us apart while we traveled. I believe that the lessons we learned during the trip helped us stay together during rough times later.

Most important, in reading these notes and reliving those times, I am grateful to be vividly reminded of Bea. The inspiration for the trip and for all that followed was hers far more than mine. She was the experienced traveler, the wandering soul who entered my life and altered it in so many ways. She dragged me into living life while I grumbled, whined, kicked and complained every inch of the way. Without her I would have endured my existence in the shell of my fantasies, imagining what living might be about, never daring to try to live it.

Now, so long after she has gone, it sometimes seems to me that the times we were together were all the good times I have ever known. Now that I am back inside my head, alone apart, I have these memories of living which transformed me, at least for a time—and which now seem more like fantasies as they recede. Re-reading the journal for the first time since Bea left has freshened my memory, and sometimes while reading the entries I find myself smiling (“God, I had forgotten that day”) or laughing aloud, or crying as an entry brings her face and voice and her body to life once more.

Puting these memories in a form that I pray will be more lasting and comprehensible may permit me to share them with others, especially the one person for whom I wish them to have the most meaning, our son Greg, who in his childhood heard many of the stories we told about the journey we once took, but who was too young when his mother died to now remember her joie de vivre; though he seems to have inherited some of her wanderlust.

Mort Borenstein
19 June 2002.