Checking Your Baggage

I didn't understand the tug of sorrow in my throat. My new "boyfriend" (silly term, because we are on the senior side of middle age) drove with me into Yosemite on a blustery, rainy spring day. I'd never been there, and I was predictably wowed as we emerged from the granite tunnel into the expanse of valley, cliff and gushing waterfalls. We pulled over and climbed out of the car to take it in. The gloom of the day accented the beauty: Moody patches of fog drifted across the cliff tops as we watched, silent and in awe.

When we reached the turbulent Merced River, Ted described how he had brought his kids, now grown, to this place when they were little, and how they had gone tubing for hours, and how glad he was then to be their father and to see them happy. He and his kids had made memories here, and Ted, now divorced, cherished these vacations with Yosemite's reassuring continuity in the background.

Then my sorrow made sense. It was too late for Ted, at 60, and me, at 52, to make that particular kind of memory. "I wish I could have been there," I said, as I wrestled with the truth of the matter: Life has limits.

We'd known each other 25 years before in the Peace Corps. We found each other again, unexpectedly, through a friend and with the help of e-mail. Our rediscovery of one another has been a miracle. We are trying something new for both of us--commuting back and forth between my home in Michigan and his in L.A. We recognize that we cannot abandon either of our lives, which have decades-deep roots. Thus, the peril of traveling with a new mate.

Travel is a ritual for creating important stories and marking time, but sometimes it's also a poignant, even unwelcome, reminder of a bygone life or a lost opportunity. Travel sometimes thrusts a sojourner, open and unsuspecting, into pain.

The next morning in Yosemite, still on Eastern time, I woke before 6 and watched my California man dozing in West Coast slumber. From our room in the Ahwahnee hotel, I could see and hear Yosemite Falls, engorged with spring runoff. I was just a month shy of my legal divorce. New at emotional control, I didn't know how to stop the thought that grabbed me: I wish my ex-husband could see this. Some of our best times had been on trips. Even though I'd never been to Yosemite with him, an irrational thought pushed in: I shouldn't have come here without him. Yet there was a competing reality. In the present I was happy, my spirit soothed by the scale of the cliffs and the brave granite. Watching Ted as he slept calmed me, but I wanted to be alone to think.