Some Roads Lead to Rome

Gary and I are off to Rome, Maine, for a few weeks. I have seen my blog as something I closed at the end of the trip to China and Japan, which now seems like a magical interlude followed by two difficult years. A few months after I returned, Gary had a heart attack near Rochelle, Illinois, on the road to Madison, Wisconsin, necessitating a single bypass and a heart valve transplant in Rockford. An ambulance brought him first to Rochelle Community Hospital, which did a few tests and sent him on in another ambulance to Swedish-American Hospital in Rockford. Thank God our younger son Garrett was with him, who had the sense to turn around the car on Route 39, driving over the median, return to a speed trap where he had spotted state troopers, and flag down one of the troopers, who asked Gary a few questions and then called for an ambulance. During the next ten days Garrett, Sarah, Matt, and I hovered in the hospital room in Rockford while Gary went through the surgery and began his recovery. He has since lost 70 or more pounds, can swim a mile at a time, and has spent the past two months building a boat trailer that he ordered online and came UPS in three boxes. We bought an inexpensive, well-aged Sunfish through Craig's List, and he has been refurbishing it since May. We have a new daggerboard, tiller, and tiller extension, all ordered on eBay. A few trips to Wilmette took us to the only store that caters to sailors in northern Illinois, where we bought new lines and a few fittings and a bridle. In June we went into Chicago for the Printers Row Book Fair - how have I missed it for so many years? It was fabulous, and the best thing was that I got to meet Mary Morris, the travel writer whose work I talked about so much in my China/Japan posts. (She and I taught in adjacent classrooms at Rutgers when my oldest child was a baby and I was in grad school. She won the Prix de Rome that year, and several years later wrote Nothing to Declare (about a sojourn in Mexico) and later Wall to Wall (about a journey from Beijing to Berlin on the Trans-Siberian Railway), both groundbreaking travel memoirs. Her most recent book is River Queen, where she takes a trip down the Mississippi on a riverboat. Spoiler Alert: the child she finds she is pregnant with in Wall to Wall, which my students read in China, is now off to college. My children are even older; my oldest is 31 and just bought his first house; my second is 27 and in grad school, and just back from a trip to Greece and Italy; my third is 23, and an art student in Chicago, making shoji screens in his summer internship/job. And this trip that Gary and I are taking is a bit of deja vu: the last time we drove anywhere with a boat on a trailer was in 1976, before we had any children, and we shared a Hobie Cat with another couple when we lived in Oceanside, CA, and Gary was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton. We sailed that in San Diego. Before that we had an Aquacat in North Carolina, when we were even younger - I was 21 and Gary 22. We got married between semesters of my senior year - Gary graduated the year before. It's so long ago we could hardly recall the details of how to secure a boat to a trailer. In North Carolina we drove a Volkswagen Bug, and when we drove from North Carolina to New Jersey we were a sight, with suitcases piled on a roofrack and a large, if light, boat trailing behind. We probably had a map or an atlas. This time we have (1) Triptiks and Guidebook from AAA; (2) a brand-new Rand McNally atlas with a leather cover and pockets for pens and cell phone and (2) a Garmin GPS. I think we can find Rome, Maine.