The big boosts to my bank account came from two directions. First, the bonuses at work were double that of the previous year, the benefit of doing this project during the recession recovery. Second, I started playing the stock market after asking a few old men at my coffee shop how to begin. I learned that old men love to talk about money and are happy to share their knowledge with doe-eyed young girls. Apparently, it takes virtually no effort to open an online account and start trading stocks. I kept trading and researching, buying and selling. When I bought a stock and it went up, I sold it. If it went down, I waited until it went back to the asking price or went green. Then I sold it. Sometimes I’d make just $30. Sometimes I’d make more. I reinvested the original sum, adding a little more each time. I kept rolling the dice and praying. I also kept investing the cash from things I had sold on eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy. It felt like free money, so if I lost, I didn’t freak out. I kept investing, shaving off the green, and depositing it into my swelling account. Over time, the balance grew. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck. Perhaps it was just a good day at the slots. Either way, it boosted my account to the point where I had reached my financial goal. I had saved up enough cash to buy myself a buffer of time to spend it any way I like.
And that’s when Spencer called to let me know just how I could spend that time.
He started by telling me that he’d seen some of my paintings online. He said he’d love to do a trade for one of his sketches. Of course, this was all just a pretense for what he really wanted to know. “I’ve been reading your blog, Janice,” he started. “You’re cleaning out your apartment and saving up cash. I need to know your plans.”
I didn’t add the master plan to the blog, that I would quit my job after reaching my goals. I knew coworkers and my mother read my blog. No need to cause alarm. I told Spencer that I didn’t have much of a plan, though I’d like to get my life down to one suitcase and take off for Europe.
He believed me.
“Listen,” he started. “I have a project. It’s global. I plan on touring universities to teach about sustainability and disaster-relief projects. I’m looking for a travel companion. Do you want to come with me?”
Me? The man I adored for no good reason, the man for whom I had bought those sexy red undies, wanted to travel around the globe with me? ME! Up until that moment in time, except for my first ride on a major roller coaster when I was eight, I had never been happier.
The trouble was that he needed money. He was trying to score funding from some philanthropists. Maybe we could find something for me to do. I’ve got a few ideas on what I could do, hot stuff. On what we could do together. Like fall in love, have babies, and stick them in our backpacks as we travel the world and smile at their cute, fat, dangling legs. We’d live off the land, eating organic things and changing the world. Oh sweet, wonderful, torn world, here we come to fix you!
But he had to get the funding first so I shouldn’t do anything dramatic like quit my job or anything. Or plan our entire life together in my imagination before we even hung up.
“I just need to get funding. I should know by the end of December, and we’d leave in January. Could you be ready?”
“I can leave any time.” When we hung up, I looked around my spacious apartment and thanked my lucky stars that I had already cleared most of it out.
8
Write Your Resignation Letter
In December, after a string of very good days on the stock market and very bad days at the office, I handed in the resignation letter I had written a few months before. My supervisor wanted me to stay on for three weeks rather than the customary two. Triggered, I suggested one week as I had spent the last four years staying late and skipping lunch breaks. This triggered her, and we proceeded to partake in the ugliest yelling match of my career. Looking back, I could have done better. She could have done better. We could have done better.
Two weeks later (minus two days out of spite), I cleared out my office. It took about two minutes. I had been emptying the drawers over time so that my office was like a movie set. Papers were on the desk, but no files were stored in the cabinets. All that was left were folders for someone else to deal with. I closed my computer, handed in my security pass at the front desk, and left with a small box of samples of my advertising work and the apple pin I had received from Leo Burnett Advertising, my first advertising agency. When I arrived home, I emptied the box on the floor, looked at it, and laughed. There was no way I would be taking my samples with me on the road. I repacked the box and walked it out to the trash. I kept the apple pin.
Everyone who worked at my Leo Burnett office got an apple pin. We all wore it. It was a pretty cool pin that represented membership in a pretty cool club.
Why the apple? When Leo Burnett created his advertising agency during the Great Depression, he had a bowl of apples in his lobby for employees and visitors. Naysayers said that opening an advertising agency in the middle of the Depression was a bad idea. They said he would soon be selling those apples on the street.
Today, Leo Burnett is the tenth largest advertising agency in the world, and every Leo Burnett office in the world offers apples at reception. Employees, clients, the FedEx guy, the UPS guy, everyone can grab an apple on their way in or out of the office.
I ate a lot of apples when I worked at Leo Burnett. And I really loved being a copywriter. I wore my apple pin with pride.
Since my first apple at Leo Burnett, I had done a lot of copywriting. A dozen years, thousands of campaigns, millions of words. But somewhere along the line, in all the agencies I worked at since, something had changed. They became More More More factories. More ads, more versions, more emails, more mail. More, more, more with less budget and less time.
And without adequate recovery time between churning out these ads, my work/life balance went severely off kilter. Monday through Friday became a flurry of work. Saturday became a recovery day. Sunday became the weekend. Year after year of this… Well, that’s no way to live. Not for me.
Other people could do the long intense hours required of an advertising agency. They even liked it. I was just not one of these people. I was not even from the same planet as these people.
I was the crow that didn’t know how to rise above the storm.
So now, I would travel the world and write about it. And I would take nothing with me from my former copywriting life except for one thing: my Leo Burnett pin. It would remind me to be grateful for what my career gave me for my journey: the friends I had made, the writing skills I had developed, and the checks that always cleared. I was grateful. But I was done.
I was also technically done with my New Year’s resolution. I had written in my journal nearly every day for the year, but by now, writing was a habit and a great way for me to carve out time for myself each day to hatch my evil plans, so I decided to keep journaling. It proved to be an excellent container where I could figure things out.
I was about to start traveling. In January, I would be leaving with Spencer, who I was referring to in my head as Love of My Life. Note to self: don’t do this.
All through December, he and I talked on the phone, excited about the prospect of hitting the road together in 2011. We imagined where we would go, what we would see. And beyond that, I imagined what might happen when our eyes were closed.
I had printed out a map of Europe and glued it into the front cover of my journal. All those squiggly boundary lines. All those countries. All those places to see. All those people to meet. All the photos I could take and the fun blog posts I could write. I had grown tired of my straight line: building the résumé, the account balance, saving for a down payment, etc. I wanted to flit about with a complete disregard for sensible living. Each day, I would trace the curvy boundary lines of my map with my finger and wonder about what the curvy route of my own line would take. Ohhh, it made my teeth tingle. And all that without a plan of where and how long?
Where should I begin? I had Spencer to figure that out. I thought so anyway. I would just wait for his call. This, of course, was our pattern. Me waiting for him to call, to arrive, to make plans, to call again because he was running late, to call and cancel. Waiting, always waiting for Spencer. Never knowing what he was thinking. Never asking. But I was willing to wait this time because I thought the romance might rekindle, plus I was scared to head out on the road alone. It would be easier to follow him around.
Two weeks of silence went by before he finally called to tell me he didn’t get the funding and the trip wasn’t going to happen. The call was short, somewhat sullen, and peppered with “That’s how it goes” and “We must be destined for something else.” I kept the tone of my voice upbeat, but I was devastated. Before he hung up, he said his customary farewell, “Aloha.”
I hung up. The prospect of leaving to travel on my own became suddenly scary. I’d have to make all the decisions now. Where to go, where to stay, how to get from here to there…everything. Before, I had imagined following Spencer around like a little puppy dog. Letting him take care of everything while I stood by. Like a little wife. And now that fantasy was done too. All of it was done. Traveling with someone. A future with him. Done, done, done.
I looked around my apartment. This spacious, bright, calm place. I was so preoccupied with leaving that I hadn’t spent much time enjoying the space. I realized in this moment that I could stay here. I could stay here in this apartment. In the middle of this, the phone, still in my hand, rang again. This time it was my friend Mary.
“Janice, you quit!” She had read my blog, which had had a steep increase in readership since announcing my departure from corporate life.
“Yes, I did.”
“Great. Want to come to Hawaii with me? We leave in three days.”
“Aloha.”
9
Or Should I Say Bonjour?
Tanned and relaxed, I tipped the beach sand out of my suitcase, repacked, sold off the rest of my furniture, handed in my apartment keys, and boarded a plane bound for Paris. Why not Rome? Because I wanted to end up in Rome, not begin there. So I would start in Paris, loop up to the United Kingdom where I would meet up with friends and family along the way who were also traveling, down to Italy and…stay? Was that the plan? Was that crazy? Maybe. So was leaving my job during, and I quote Suze Orman, “the big money-making years.”
I paid for my furnished flat for the six weeks I would be in Paris. The utilities were included so I had no bills. To not have bills felt like an anchor had been lifted and I was free to explore the world untethered to any responsibilities. I was free to roam.
And roam I did. In my first week in Paris, I visited the big tourist attractions with Summer: the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur, Arc de Triomphe. It was great fun, but she and I had spent the week telling the stories of who we were and what brought us to Paris. All of that was fine and lovely, but when I was finally alone, I had to admit the silence was nice.
Each morning, I sauntered over to the café to write in my journal and take in the view of my sexy butcher. If I was lucky, he would take his break while I was sitting at the café. Though he didn’t approach me, he did his fair share of staring and smiling. He would lean against the wall just beyond the butcher shop and smoke a cigarette. In my LA life, cigarette smoking was a big red flag. But here, it was just sexy. And I learned that I was in the minority as a nonsmoker. The butcher’s arms were crossed over his chest as he leaned against the wall. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a long cloud of smoke as he stared off at a distant thought. He would take a sideways glance at me, and I would look down to my journal. My cheeks would get warm. I would look up, and he would still be watching me. I smiled; he smiled. I exhaled. He took another drag.
Once my writing was done, I would pay for my café crème. By my second week, it was still too creamy for my liking, but I wasn’t sure how to ask for less cream. I only knew how to ask for a café crème so that’s what I got.
I would send my butcher boyfriend a small wave. I could feel his eyes on my back as I left. I walked slowly up rue Mouffetard toward one of the eighteen arrondissements to explore. I got lost. I would find a Métro station and look at the map at the entrance. Each map has a big Vous êtes ici red dot. You are here. Yes, but why?
I thought when I first arrived in Paris that my biggest anxiety would be the language, but that fear fell away the moment I had to use the Métro. There are 303 stations, which makes the newcomer to Paris want to walk. But I soon learned that Paris was too much city for my aching feet. Plus, the Art Nouveau design of the stations was seductive. Their curving iron tendrils drew me in, and soon I was swallowed into the belly of the city. To my surprise, delight, and relief, the Métro was easier to master than I thought it would be. Each line is color-coded and numbered, and the direction each train is going is named after the final station. And maps are everywhere—above ground, below ground, and above each door on each train. As I sat on the train, I liked to imagine those who carved out the city—likely blowing out ancient Roman ruins and catacombs in the process. No one seemed to mind though. We sat on the train in silent contemplation as we zipped under the city, occasionally verifying with a sideways glance at the map that we were, in fact, headed in the right direction.
On the morning after Summer had left, I meandered up the Seine toward one of the Métro stations, but the river was sparkling like diamonds in the morning sun so I changed directions and walked along it instead. It was a beautiful time in my life when I was alone and could change course on a whim. No one to consult. No one expecting me to be somewhere. No one to convince. Along my walk, I took in the ornate iron balconies and steeply pitched roofs studded with oval dormer windows held in place by stone angels. I crossed a bridge and arrived at Notre Dame. The windswept esplanade in front of the cathedral was always crowded with tourists, pigeons, and beggars. Gargoyles peered down to ward off evil spirits (and also served as spouts to keep rainwater from running down walls and eroding mortar: gargoyle-gargle) and the front façade was lined with carvings of saints that seem to say, “Come on in, good lookin’.” So that’s what I did.
Mass was starting as I walked into the cathedral, so I took a seat. My feet needed the rest anyway. As I sat, I remembered a time when I had fantasized about all the things I’d do once I arrived in Paris, such as going to mass at Notre Dame. Now here I was, wandering without a plan, and boom!
Sometimes dreams come at us sideways.
Catholic masses are the same all around the world. The priests all say the same thing in the same way: even the cadence at which they speak is the same. You may not realize it until you go to other churches in different languages, but it’s easy to follow along. And since I rarely listened even in the English masses, I felt quite at home zoning out with the French.
For me, the church had always been quiet and uneventful, and that’s how I liked it. When I was a kid, I sat next to my sisters, mom, and grandma. Cousins and classmates filled the surrounding pews. I’d respond to the responsorial psalms and stand, sit, and kneel along with the congregation, but my mind was wandering or blank. Or I would stare at how the sun glimmered through stained-glass windows, making kaleidoscope patterns on the bald heads of those in front of me. The stained-glass scenes depicted were those of Jesus’s greatest hits: the miracles, healing the sick, the walk up Calvary Hill, the crucifixion, the rising from the dead. And then there were the rows and rows of saints that peered down from above with their arms raised to either give a blessing or wave. (Hey, good lookin’!)
The Catholic Church offers a slew of saints that you can pray to for every issue in your life. Saint Anthony is one of my favorites as he is the patron saint of lost things, and since I was traveling with only the essentials, I was paranoid about losing any of them. He’s even got his own rhyming prayer: Dear Saint Anthony, please come around. I’ve lost
my (fill in the blank), and it cannot be found. My sister once said of Saint Anthony, “Watch what you ask for from Saint Anthony. It really works. You’ve got be careful. You’ve got to really want it back.”
There is Archangel Michael, who will cut your ties with whatever and whoever you want out of your life. And then there is Saint Christopher, who I thought of a lot as he is the patron saint of safe travels and that’s exactly what I was praying for. The greatest daily threat to a traveler’s life is traffic. After a few close calls with scooters, I had rubbed the Saint Christopher medallion around my neck more than once in thanks and prayer. Notre Dame has its own special saint. Apparently, Saint Louis IX was the King of France and he bought the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin II of Constantinople. I wonder if he prayed to Saint Anthony to help find it.
After I had peeled the bland Eucharist off the roof of my mouth and Quasimodo rang out the last bells of mass, I joined the procession out the door and headed down the river to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6e arrondissement to find myself a crêpe. It was a chilly day in March, and I was looking for something warm and toasty. Now that I didn’t have a steady income, street food occasionally served as the big meal of the day. I walked down a market street lined with restaurants and tourist shops and found a crêpe stand where they whipped up a crêpe with egg, mushroom, and cheese.
With my first bite, I almost fell over. The paper-thin warm pancake enclosed the cheese, which pulled the egg and mushroom together in a trinity of amazing.
One word: Eucharist.
How had I ever been vegan?
Paris Letters Page 5
