It might have been in my window seat up on a plane over Las Pampas, watching the fertile land grow drier as we neared the mountains and Chile beyond. It might have been sitting alone at one of the delightful everyday steakhouses with an ojo de bife inbound, complemented by a bottle of Malbec where you drink what you can before tapping it and walking the rest home. Certainly it was present when after more than a week of aimless strolling, I sat down on a bench in the Jardines Botanicos Carlos Thays reading Memoirs of Hadrian before leaning back and letting my eyes close for a little while, the trees swaying in the light breeze above. I'm not sure when it happened exactly but at some point there was a shift and the things once put at a premium, such as being alone at the bottom of the world, seemed to matter a whole lot less than I remember they did.
It wasn't always to be this way in Argentina. I once dated someone from here, one of the truly great women of my life, and for a moment in time in the grip of the pandemic it appeared this place might be something more, be a place revisited, be part of a new ever changing idea of home which future kids come to think of as I do Texas. These are glimpses offered to each of us every so often of what life could have been had things gone differently, had someone not gone to school, had someone not cared about a career, had place not mattered, only people. I still remember driving her over the Appalachians and across the American heartland to Ann Arbor, moving in a few boxes and saying goodbye, and now years later I walk around her homeland trying to absorb something that is just a bit too out of reach and which I may be just a bit too old and far along to try for anyway.
This is okay. I'm surprised how okay it is. I have played passive observer to worlds not mine for as long as I can remember and I come back to New York feeling grateful, embracing the strivings of my life, its current iteration, its current idea of home and that which makes it sing. It is glorious dropping into foreign lands for a time, and I hope I never lose that sense of wonder and possibility, knowing what it is to get lost, to be confused, to misread a situation, to stumble on words, to not know how something is done here, every little thing a math problem to be solved. But then too there is nothing like the foundation of home to steady and expand yourself. There is a beautiful concept in psychology called automaticity, speaking about tasks such as a commute or eating that become automatic through repetition, which thus releases mental capacity for other things. On familiar roads living in the automatic, you create space to dream. And so back on familiar roads far from Palermo shops and Mendoza vineyards, I dream.
