Circumnavigate the globe.

Check.

Learn about biological father.

Check.

Lose too much weight, most of my bets, and a girlfriend in the process.

Check.  Check.  Check.

Not to pat myself  on the back too much here, but I have to say, this whole boondoggle wasn’t too shabby an idea.  It sure turned out to be a phenomanel way to see the world. 

It had it’s drawbacks certainly…Never spending lengthy times in one place…The solo nature of it at times…The scraping by after losses.  Overall though, who wouldn’t want to rip through a dozen countries gambling, siteseeing, mingling with untold strangers all the while learning a little something about one’s past?

I may never do it again, but I highly recommend some variation of it for anyone looking to shake things up.

—

Thanks to everyone who has been reading these posts along the way.  It was great knowing there were people along for the ride.   Hopefully in the limited time/space I had for each entry, I was able to give a glimpse of what was going on.  Now, whereas the blog was a ‘glimpse’, the book will be more of a ‘gawk’, with plenty more details to fill in the blanks (as well as a few secrets I just might have held back on…).

—

My last hours in Colombia were spent alone in the rain in Bogota.  Not an auspicious way to cap off the trip, but one thing I’ll probably always remember about my last day was the airport search.

They are pretty tight there what with the drug smuggling and all, but still I didn’t see them yank anyone from the ticket line until they got to me.  When the security agent told me he would have to go through my bag, I was thinking, hey knock yourself out…you’re the one that’s going to have to dig through all the grimy, wet-from-the-rain, clothes that were last washed, oh, in Thailand.  By this point in the trip, I can re-pack that bag, blindfolded in about 30 seconds anyway, so the pain-in-the-ass was his not mine.

My pack checked out.  And after a pat down that was extensive enough that I think the guy still owes me dinner and drinks, I was let on my way.  When I later went to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and saw that I had two white smears caked on both corners of my mouth.  I guess that morning while rushing for the airport, I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t washed the toothpaste spit that was on  my face.  Funny most places.  Not in a Columbian security line where it looked like the smuggled cocaine-filled condom I had just swallowed was slowly leaking and I was foaming at the mouth. 

Cleaned up and presentable, I got to Orlando a few hours later, answered a couple questions…

“Are you carrying over $10,000 in cash?”

Don’t  I wish.

“Are you bringing anything into the country I should know about?”

Nope.

“Are you bringing anything you don’t want me to know about?”

Just that burst cocaine condom.

And with that I was welcomed back to the USA.

A couple friends, Bruso and Jeff, picked me up and we headed to Joel’s house for a belated group birthday weekend that also included Ed, Mickey and Teddy.  Since I haven’t yet had a chance to get signed affidavits from them on what I can and cannot reveal, I’ll have to give you the redacted version of the weekend:

After we finished a round of golf in which I crushed Mickey per usual, we went to a Magic-Bucks NBA game and then a rooftop bar called Latitudes where xxxxxxx, until xxxxxxx, whereupon xxxxxxx disappeared.  After a 3 AM breakfast at Steak and Shake, the cops pulled us over and xxxxxxx, until magically Joel talked the cop into allowing us to go home, sans ticket (or worse).  When we woke up in the morning, xxxxxxx, who we had lost the night before, was lying on the couch having found his way home bloodhound-like, despite not having Joel’s address.  We might have been worried somewhere along the line, but it seems to be a trend with him.  First time he visited me in NYC, we lost him in Manhattan and hours later I got a voicemail saying, “not sure where I am, but all the tall buildings are on the wrong side of the river”.  And yet, somehow he found his way from Brooklyn into Manhattan and out to Queens to my apartment without directions.

The next day, xxxxxxx, xxxxxxx,  and then xxxxxxx after which Joel’s buddy Andy took us boating.  Three hours worth of re-hashing old stories later, and I think Andy might be regretting it.  He’s going to have certain unwanted images of Teddy seared to his brain for years to come.

—

In a perfect conclusion to the gambling portion of the trip, my final bet came down to the final play of the game.  Missouri, down 7 with 8  seconds to go and the ball.  The game effectively over, but the point spread very much alive.  A meaningless last basket and the game would end at 5, covering the 5 and 1/2 point spread, giving me the win.

Mizzou guy dribbles the length of the court, lays it up off the glass for two and…

…and keeping with the prevailing trend of the trip’s bets…misses the bunny to keep it at 7 and put an exclamation point on whoever is trying to tell me I really shouldn’t gamble.

— 

Thanks again to Joel for a great weekend.  And to his neighbors whom Joel went to on Thursday and apologized ahead of time for any stupidity, nudity or outright illegality that they may be witness to while we were there.

And with that, I got on my last  plane of the trip and completed the circle back to Vermont…all the while thinking nothing except, wouldn’t it be ironic to crash on the final leg after logging 30,000 miles or so?

We didn’t.

It would have made for a definitive ending to all these posts though.  Instead, let me close with one last thing about the person who inspired this whole escapade–that entertaining, live-life-to-the-fullest man my mom met flying over Cambodia, aka my biological father.

To be completely honest, over the early years of my life, I never gave my father a lot of thought, but one thing that I have dwelled on is this…I wonder what those 8  months were like when both of us were alive.    I was obviously little more than an eating, crying, crapping machine at that point, but still, interaction was had.  What happened?

Years ago when I learned that my parents were separated at the time of my birth and that they weren’t even living in the same country, I obsessed on the thought of, ‘I wonder exactly how much time we spent together’.  He was in Mexico  and I was with my mother and sister in Vermont.  How many weeks or days or was it hours were we in sight of each other?  I never wanted to ask my mom this, so I never really knew.  Then, a week or so ago, I was sitting in Santa Marta, Colombia and I realized I had the answer right there in my pack.

His passport.

If I looked at the stamps going to and from Mexico the year leading up to his death, I could count the days and get the exact number we spent together.  Taking it a step further, I could subtract 8 hours a  day for sleep, and say, another 8 for other stuff he was doing during the day, and I could probably pin it to a fairly educated guess as to how many hours we spent together over the course of our lives.

104.

We spent more or less 104 hours in each other’s company.

104 hours with your old man.  And they weren’t even the quality ones like, learning how to throw a curveball or talk to a girl.  It was me filling diapers and sucking my thumb.  Good times.  Good times.

I’ll admit, after tallying this, I wasn’t exactly the most chipper guy sittiing there in this dingy cafe.  I might have even been thinking…this all sucks.  Him dying.  This trip.  Writing about it.  Me.

And then a thought crossed my mind.  Not a ‘clouds open, sun ray shining upon thee’ epiphany moment…probably more a ‘cheap-Colombian-beer-kicking-in’ moment, and I thought about a conversation I had with someone on this trip.  Sometime on one of those Cambodian bus trips, that girl Flor and I were talking about an Ashton Kutcher movie–The Butterfly Effect.  And from there we  started on about how the littlest thing can push you this way or that…you know, that whole concept of a butterfly flapping his wings in the Amazon can alter the entire world, yada, yada.

Well, 104 hours with my father kinda sucks.  But had he lived, there is a whole lifetime of things and people I never would have had in  my life (by the way, yes, I do realize how self-serving this thinking is…given the choice I don’t think Hector Senior would have wanted to kick it just so that I could live the life I have.  But nevertheless, humor me a moment).    Had he lived I would have likely grown up who knows where.  Mexico?  The Phillippines?  Some 20 difffferent countries in 18 years?  Who knows, but it wouldn’t have been Vermont.

And if it wasn’t Vermont, then I’d never have met my first and longtime friends Toofie and JL.  Or later, picking up lifelong friends Bruso and Mickey…without whom I don’t know Joel, Teddy, Jeff and Molly.  College might have been great in whichever country I ended up in, but I wouldn’t have had Shawn, Cardoza, Colin and the rest in my life.  Summers wouldn’t have been at the Tyler Place, so there goes Gord, Lynn, Dunc, Emily, the Garretts, both McNeils, Malaney and Singer. 

It always fascinates me how even the tiniest deviations can, boom, lead you along a whole thread of difffirent people.

No New York, and there goes the Adam, Ed, Mollie, Laurie, Wayne, Kelli, Carolyn, Delinda thread.

LA?  Boom, I miss out on the Labatto, Roers, Catherine, Pauly, Yanika, Travis, Tim, Chad, Brad, Dave, Jo, Chris, Burks and the rest of Rick’s thread.

Maybe I’d be married to a wonderful Mexican woman right now, but, boom, I would have  missed out on Paige, Tracey and Megan…who deserves a thread of her own.   (Again, I reiterate, this is all very self-serving.  I’m sure there are some exes of mine who are thinking, “where was the Butterfly Effect that could’ve kept that #%&hole out of my life?”) .

I do regret never getting the opportunity to know the relatives on my Mexican side better, but had I lived there, I would have missed out on all the great times I’ve had with my cousins on my Uncle Ted’s side–who deserves special mention himself by the way, for those years betwen Hector Senior’s death and my mom re-marrying, during which time he would include me in camping trips and father-son events with his own sons.

I could go on and on with these threads….I’m leaving out so many people.

-

As I just read back over this, I have to admit, I considered deleting it because it seems a little heartless to essentially say, ‘oh, no worries…it was a good thing my father died young’.  But I’m including it anyway.  I thought it; I may as well admit to it.

And while generally I’m a pessimist about most things, with this one I feel like looking on the bright side and I’ll take the chance of sounding like a rank sentimentalist in taking this roundabout way to tell all these people that, while I would have absolutely loved knowing my father, I couldn’t be happier with what the alternative brought.