zimatravels

Caution:  This post contains information about the plot of the new movie, Revolutionary Road.

I not only understood the new movie Revolutionary Road; in many ways I feel I lived it.  There are many books and films of young people who set out for far away places in search of the unknown and unpredictable.  There are  fewer books and films about middle-aged people “living lives of quiet desperation.”  But it is a rare book or film that stars a 30-ish couple with children and a good life by most standards who decide that the husband will give up his promotion, they’ll sell everything, and all move to a foreign city.

I understood why April, the wife and mother, who loves her husband and her children, committed adultery.   Unlike April in the film, however, my conscious mind was not aware of the desperate urging of my subconscious that something vital was missing in my life.  I was in the paradise of Santa Barbara at that time,  living in a lovely home with a view of stately mountains in one direction, and a gorgeous ocean in the other direction.  With my loving husband of 15 years, my growing son, my affectionate dog, year-round sunshine and interesting activities,  I thought I had everything I wanted.  However, I do think April would have understood why I was horrified one morning when I woke up and realized I knew what the next 20 years of my life would be like.

Although BootsnAll readers would most likely be sympathetic to April’s intense need to travel abroad into the unknown, I attempted to watch Revolutionary Road from an average person’s viewpoint.   I understood how people could think of April and Frank as ungrateful for what they had, self-indulgent, and yes, childish and selfish.  Yet, I respected the fact that the wife understood her own deeper needs for something else and was able to ignite her husband’s under-expressed and less desperate dissatisfaction with his life.  All my attempts over several years to convince my husband he wanted to live in other countries failed completely.  I finally had to accept that he didn’t want to.

I had friends who looked at me with the same incredulity as the couple’s neighbors when they announced their plans to leave.  My friends couldn’t believe I was giving up my marriage and leaving my 12 year old son who chose to stay with his father who offered a more secure,  familiar, and predictable future.  It didn’t help that I, myself, couldn’t really explain why, or what I wanted.  I had no plan.  Going to Israel in 1983 as an immigrant at the age of 40 further shocked them.  And, traveling to mostly unknown China in 1988 because I was curious about the place and its people made no sense to anyone I knew.

The husband’s choice at the end of this sad film was to somewhat alter the career he had disliked, move to another U.S. city with his children, and basically retain the lifestyle he had been ready to give up only with his wife’s encouragement.   My choice was to follow my wanderlust around the world for the next 16 years.  I consider them the best years of my life.  My former husband remarried and still teaches and lives in the same paradise we went to together in 1975, confirming that there could have been no way for us to have remained together and fulfilled our individual dreams.

What is the essence of the restlessness that turns good lives topsy turvy?  I wondered many times if my need to roam the world would have been satisfied if I had done it in my youth before marriage.  But I don’t think so.  Many years and wrinkles later, I once again live in a paradise near another part of the spectacular Pacific Ocean.  I love my home, my surroundings, and my many physical and mental activities.  And yet….I still occasionally feel an inner restlessness that pushes me out of paradise.  The urge is not as strong, and it has been modified by age, but it hasn’t left me.  April would understand.

After seeing the movie, I couldn’t help uselessly wondering what the couple’s life would have been like if their story had been set in present time when she wouldn’t have died from a do-it-yourself abortion.   Would their children and the marriage have thrived in Paris?  Would changing location so drastically really have changed their lifestyle so much?  Would it have  filled the void in their lives and their relationship?  Would they have kept traveling?  Would both husband and wife have felt fulfilled?  Would their marriage and love still have ended tragically?  Would they have ever settled down permanently?

The following is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.  It was written in my travel journal on May 3, 1985.

A few hours on Friday afternoon before Shabbat began at sundown, Reuven came to my room to get help writing letters to some of the Americans who had visited our boarding school.  My radio was on and a report came on from BBC about the Ethiopian government closing a refugee camp in the Gondar region and sending everyone back home even though there was no food.  He asked me for some details his minimal English couldn’t pick out.

As I spoke, his brown eyes began to deepen.  It was as though the covering over a well had opened and I was being drawn inward and downward into the depth of his private pain and suffering.  He told me that his grandparents were still there, and said simply and practically, “But, what can I do?”

I had to go off to do an errand and told him he could stay there and listen to the radio while I was gone.  When I returned, he was sprawled across the bed sideways holding the small radio and looking like a very sad old man-child.  Although Reuven was a child to whom tears often came quickly, I saw that this pain was both familiar and deeper than tears.  I knew he had also lost a young brother who hadn’t survived the refugee camps.

I was awed by the depth of pain in his eyes, and I felt admiration and respect for the internal resources for physical and psychic survival that he had developed over three years in Sudan before getting to Israel.  I also felt guilty for having brought the news to his attention.  I suggested that, in the time remaining before dinner, we take a ride in my car.  My car, new and shiny, had been a source of wonderment, curiosity, and delight to all the children at the boarding school, and especially to Reuven.

He readily agreed, and I turned my car toward the mountains leading to the nearby Lebanese border.  I suppose I symbolically chose the mountain route because I wanted to lift his spirits.  And it worked.  As the car climbed higher, he climbed out of the well of pain.  I knew, as I’m sure he knew, that the pain would remain unchanged deep within him.  But he wanted to let go of the pain for now and just soar up there with the mountain and the rocks.

He and I shared a common trait.  He, a child of the mountains, and I, a product of city life, loved nature and went to it for comfort and revitalization.  We both exclaimed over and over again at the breathtaking views.  I put on a Stevie Wonder tape and we sang, “I just called to say I love you.  I just called to say I care,” — I in my not-so-in-tune American accent, and he in his Ethiopian approximation of the sounds.

Well before the border, we stopped and walked a bit in the quiet and stately beauty of the place.  We investigated the rocks and small vegetation, and he found an old, rusty knife blade.  He spoke of how he had watched his father forge knife blades in Ethiopia, and how he had learned to help him.  I was glad to see that he could feel the happiness of this memory, and with some shock, I realized that all the good and happy memories of his childhood came before he was 11 years old when he had walked out of  Ethiopia into Sudan.  I was glad that, at least for this moment, he could enjoy his childhood memories in a happiness uncontaminated by ugly memories or of missing and longing for what once was.

We drove back to welcome Shabbat.