January 15, 1986

7:25 p.m.

Pittsburgh International Airport

“It must be in my nature, for anyone who gave me so much as a sardine could obtain anything from me.” –St. Teresa of Avila.

Was I carrying this quote on a folded slip of paper, waiting like a courier to slip the message to another shadowy part of myself? Or did I read it for the first time that evening in the copy of Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time I’d borrowed from a friend? I no longer remember. Even with the 30-year-old notebook beside me, there are gaps in the record; geologists call these missing intervals unconforming time.

That night in 1986, when I opened my copybook to a new page, I’d been on stand-by for so long I could have driven half-way home to Philadelphia. Seated at the end of a row of padded vinyl seats at one of the U.S. Airways gates, barricaded behind my cloth suit carrier and a new leather court bag, the words of the saint ricocheted against my ribs. A few hours earlier, when a stranger had held the door for me, I’d wrestled with the impulse to follow him home. In pencil, across the blue lines, I challenged my stray dog reaction. “Why am I so grateful and so vulnerable to even the smallest human kindnesses?” Was common courtesy “so lacking in my life that it should be cause for wonder?” I craved thoughtfulness and resented wanting anything that much.

The entry continued onto the next page. I was “a tourist in my own life,” unrecognizable to myself. “I feel like I’ve been awakened from a sound sleep in an unfamiliar place.” Although genuine, the bewilderment wasn’t new. I’d been adept at tuning out what I didn’t like since I was a child. Becoming aware of anything I had been avoiding was always disorienting. Hours of solitude, distance from home, the surprise of desire in a fleeting connection, all combined to expose the unhappiness I meant to deny. After eight years of marriage marred by the rifts of two separations within the first three years, I thought I had appeased my discontent with education and absorbing work. In just a few days, the façade I’d constructed to hide the truth would begin to collapse; but that night in the airport, I still believed my knee-bouncing restlessness could be controlled.

Relegated to the last flight of the evening, I wrote “daydreams of skating” to create a distraction. Unspent energy coiled in the small of my back as I glided at great, imaginary speed across Garrity’s Pond and Prophecy Creek, no longer fearful of falling through the ice. My limbs felt electric, although I never moved from my seat.

My body knew before my heart or mind where the writing, once begun, would take me.