Date: 2007-12-15
To: Book 1, Chapter 27
Miles today: 0.0

A note to my future biographers: The story of my life has three volumes, neatly divided into 33.3 year sections, as I have decided today that I will live to be a hundred.   The exciting adventures of first volume will hook your readers with its thrilling tales and the dynamic discoveries of life¢s ¢truths.¢ The then-captivated audience will follow the trials and triumphs of the second volume as we build a family and I embark on a distinguished career in something that apparently is not revealed until the end of the first volume. The third book in the series will be a bit slower in pace, but full of the clever wit and wisdom that only a lifetime provides. And at the end, the reader will weep, when, at the exact age of one hundred, sometime in the early morning, I will die of a broken heart because just few days prior Hank will have passed peacefully in his sleep.         Reflections on Volume I: I will happily confess to the enriching exhilaration of living this first book, but I must admit that there are moments it makes me uneasy. It becomes difficult to explain the prudence of an Appalachian Thru-hike or another year museuming in Europe when your peers speak of their children and careers. I read Thoreau to comfort me and to validate my lifestyle.                 I attribute it to my mother. Ah, Freud, be proud! When we are lying on the couch of realization, we seem to always relate things back to our mothers.         In the movie, ¢The Hunt for Red October,¢ when asked what he will do after he defects, the Russian officer describes a lovely image of his family on a little ranch in beautiful Montana. My mother cried, when in the movie, the transferring of the submarine did not go as planned, and the dying officer uttered his final words: ¢I never saw Montana.¢                One summer evening, my mother and I were horseback riding across a pasture full of killdeers and yellow flowers. The setting sun cast the sky in the most brilliant kaleidoscope of colors. She told me that this moment had always been a childhood dream: to ride with her daughter into the sunset. Another was to see Montana.        She would watch documentaries about Yellowstone and clip magazine articles about Glacier National Park. Once she called me into her room to look at a photo from a calendar of a buffalo herd in the twilight mist of morning. She would always speak of our family vacation ¢next year.¢ That was sometime ago, a little over half of my current lifetime. On a deceptively beautiful yet icy morning, the fates claimed my mother. She never saw Montana.        In volume two, I will do all the things I am supposed to do.   In fact, I look forward my house, my fulfilling job. I both fear and adore the thought of children. I have no doubt that this future will make for a good read.       But until then, I will continue eat my dessert before my dinner. I will keep writing nonsense poetry in Parisian cafes, swimming with sharks in the surprisingly cool waters around the Galapagos, and ordering the odd dish on the menu. On the Appalachian Trail, I will live each day deliberately and find fulfillment in each step, whether it be painful or pleasant. I will see Montana ¢ though ironically, I have not done so yet, either.