Ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange.
– David Bowie
Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan.
When a friend said he knew someone with an extra ticket to the Plant Page concert, I didn’t think of it as a date with Robie. When I bought Robie a simple, silver band for his birthday, I didn’t intend to use it to propose. And when I popped the question at our favorite sushi joint, I didn’t expect Robie to be tongue tied.
Years later after Robie and I moved to Florida and rented a small place on the water, we didn’t plan on our landlady refusing to pay the mortgage or that the bank would begin foreclosure proceedings. When we left Florida in our sailboat, we weren’t intending to circumnavigate the Caribbean, and when we returned to land and set up residence in Santa Fe, we hadn’t known we’d return to Dallas within the year.
Because life’s full of unexpected surprises.
Following our vacation in Spain, Robie and I worked toward a move to San Sebastian. We researched necessary health certificates from our doctors, insurance requirements for non-Spanish citizens, bank accounts with local institutions and what was required in an FBI background check. At every step, we filled out reams of paperwork because choosing to live outside one’s country of birth isn’t something taken lightly by the prospective government where you hope to reside, a fact we were reminded of daily thanks to the political stalemate taking place across our own home state.
A move to Spain, we learned, would be tenuous. With an initial resident visa valid for 12 months, we could then request two extensions, each good for two additional years. And if no one denied our renewals then after five years Robie and I would be eligible for permanent resident status. Yet during those five years, we could only leave the country for ten months. Total.
During a call to our helpful Spanish immigration lawyer, we asked her if the rule about leaving the country meant that even after carefully allocating our time outside Spain something called us back to the States and put us over the ten months grace period, would it negate our resident visa application.
She said it would.
And with that, our dreams of moving to Spain vanished. Because while we wanted to live in San Sebastian for the foreseeable future, we also intended to use it as a home base for travel. Frustrated and directionless, we headed back to the drawing board.
“We could go to Mexico,” Robie suggested though even my abiding love for the country made the concept feel like a second-rate consolation prize. As I tried to envision the place to spend our future, I was blinded by my own rootless history since for most of my life I never lived anywhere long. Between childhood as an IBM brat and my own wanderings, over the decades I’d managed to live in two foreign countries, ten states, six houses, three duplexes, eight apartments, a hotel, one dorm, and onboard the sailing vessel The Last Resort.
For years Robie and I lived wherever our jobs demanded, even after the pandemic allowed us to work from anywhere. But when we quit working, we’d be untethered from the office and free. Finally free. “Free to face the life that’s ahead of me,” I suddenly began to croon like Dennis DeYoung in Styx’s 1977 Come Sail Away, a song considered by Malcolm Dome of Classic Rock as “one of the all-time great power ballads.”
On board, I’m the captain
So climb aboard
We’ll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I’ll try, oh Lord, I’ll try
To carry on
Fortunately for all involved, this spontaneous burst of song occurred while I was away for work and in the shower at a posh Caribbean resort. Because not only am I unable to carry a tune and so forced to confine any warbling inside the privacy of the shower, a glass-encased cage is always where I do my best thinking. Standing under free-flowing water awash in the mundane routine of lather, rinse, repeat with little to disturb the stream of consciousness, my thoughts take off on their own, meandering aimlessly, segueing randomly, mixing and matching excerpts from the past with ideas for the future until they collide like two crashing atoms.
Then I see things I never dreamed.
As I stood under the cascade of water inside an enormous two-person shower quietly in awe at the size of the space, I finally understood that Robie and I didn’t need to find a permanent place to wait for the inevitable. Because retirement wasn’t a window of opportunity. It was a gaping open doorway filled with a beam of beautiful, bright sunlight penetrating into the darkness and beckoning us to come outside and play. And once my eyes adjusted to the glare, I saw a future of endless possibilities.
Jumping out of the shower, I immediately set my wet fingers to texting Robie in short bursts that lit up his phone repeatedly.
What if we didn’t move somewhere for retirement? Ding
What if we bounced around for a while? Ding
Travel slowly, check out different places. Ding
Not looking to move. Ding
Just for fun. Ding
And when the tourist visas run out, we move on. Ding
Start in Europe. Ding
Jump from Schengen to non-Schengen. Ding
It’ll be grand! Ding
In reaction to my string of excited texts, the only response I got was a thumbs up emoji. Because I’d bothered Robie at work, the twelve hours each day when my husband barely got up from his home office desk and only showered after the close of business on the West Coast. Yet as I looked at the small screen and stared at that thumb, it was all the encouragement I needed.
I saw now that Mexico would always be there for me. While the country wouldn’t be where Robie and I would begin retirement, it would be home when we were ready to settle down. And the realization brought feelings I hadn’t sensed in a long time. For the first time in years, I felt a calm tranquility that we finally had a plan – even if that idea was little more than a grey outline of something yet to be determined. Then the feeling of serenity was rapidly replaced by a nervous tingling in my gut as I heard my heart pounding in my chest and the hair on my arms stood straight out. Pacing around the hotel room in a towel, my mind raced trying to imagine the future.
Robie and I were going to travel!
I wanted nothing more, needed nothing less.