“Where to travel in October.” That was the title of the New York Times question that suddenly popped up on my laptop screen on a gray storm-wrapped morning, just as my connection went dead and my allergies kept my nose running, eyes itching, and me fumbling for the Kleenex box.
As a child, I was told that when something wasn’t working, keep hitting it really hard until it does. So I kept punching the return key.
I had just come back from my daily run up to Aroma Joe’s for coffee, and was sliding down the brand new, sparkling-wet, clean Main Street in Waterville, that runs from the old post office straight down to the Lockwood Hotel. Are you with me?
My feeling at that moment was, as you can tell, one of desperation.
I recalled a long ago moment on my way to an audition, and in the middle of a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, the friendly cab driver advised me to “pretend you’re in a happier place.”
So I closed my eyes and ran through a few. I saw Tokyo in the rain, Hong Kong Bay in the moonlight, the backseat of a green Chevy in an old drive-in movie in Waukegan.
And then, there I was on the Appian way in Rome to where it ends at the Spanish steps where the holy and the hip, priests and hippies, used to meet, and where the poet John Keats died at sunset of a broken heart.
It worked.
A Spanish dancer I was dating back in my black hair days, when rainy days were for lovers, told me that Appian story while sharing martinis at a table in Rockefeller Center. So I included that on my laptop.
“You’ve been there, surely, ” she whispered, as beautiful skaters whipped by.
I lied and said “yes,” but I had just read all of that in a travel magazine in a dentist’s office.
I lied a lot in my black hair days, before I met and married a Catholic girl with auburn red hair, who told me lying was a venial sin, even if the lie was shared by lovers.
“Where to travel in October” was a feature article clearly penned by a young New York Times copyeditor assigned to come up with a list of places he or she hadn’t visited, or because they don’t have enough money to pay the rent on their midtown city apartment. But it grabbed me.
There’s Sicily, of course. I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen “The Godfather” 89 times and feel like I have.
Since they shot the “Godfather” there, the prices have shot up, and besides, who wants to visit Sicily where Apollonia Corleone was blown up in a rented car, and Michael went home and married Kay.
Ireland. I have a million stories about Ireland, collected since childhood from my grandparents who hated Ireland’s constant rain, the potatoes and the rain, the endless cabbage dishes. And the rain.
So my grandmother stole money from behind the stove where her father kept it, took her baby sister and got on a boat to America where, she was told, you could get rich by writing lies. It was a lie, of course, but only a venial sin lie.
Well, the rain stopped, and I’m stuck with these allegories. Where to travel in October? Pick your “happier place,” and remember it. Someday, someone will ask you.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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