Dear Tom,

When we met all those years ago in Belize, we were doing the Lord’s work, though few of us in that outfit were people of faith. We were working in the Lord’s vineyards and also drinking in the vineyards and having love affairs in the vineyards and generally thinking too highly of ourselves in the vineyards and away from the vineyards. The Peace Corps. We hoped our work could undo some small part of the colonialist past. We didn’t realize how impossible it was for the children of thieves to become agents of light. How many of us had enslavers in our family tree? All of us did, of course.

We were our most authentic when we held back on the do-gooder-ism and allowed ourselves to ride some worn-out bus from one country to the next, feasting on cultures not our own. The first time you and I met, you came to my small wooden house with M, a lovely woman who would share our days for some months to come. The two of you had slipped across the border from Honduras in a long dugout canoe steered by a man with a dour expression and an impossible name. You hitchhiked to my rickety house in the village of Forest Home, where I fixed you a meal of sorts, an embarrassingly meagre dried-pea soup so full of hot peppers none of us could eat it. M and I pretended it was okay. We sat in candlelight and silence—that house had no electricity—and you made small wistful statements about frying up the plantain you had been carrying from one country to the next. You had the metabolism of a long-distance runner and you were so hungry that night you couldn’t stop talking. Washing up later, I found most of the habaneros had ended up in your portion of the soup. You had picked the slices of pepper out of the peas, lining them up neatly on the edge of your bowl.

 

We worked hard those years in Belize. I worked harder than anyone because I was less qualified for my job than most of our friends were. After my false start in Forest Home, I moved up to the Cayo to teach young boys in a reform school, where I made every mistake a person could make in the classroom, including some that had never been made before. After my second day in the clean bare schoolhouse, I vowed never to take a job as a teacher again. You taught biology in the city; you were much better at the task than I was. I envied the volunteers who had actually gone to school to learn the jobs they were doing, the nurses and social workers, that redheaded entomologist from Texas. Enthusiasm, my only attribute, was overrated. We agreed that most of the other volunteers were sane, and a couple were not. Most stayed for a complete tour, and some left early.

 

I married one of those Peace Corps nurses, JW, and back in the states it took us just a few years to realize the marriage was a mistake. We did not end the relationship as we started it, with an easy optimism. You and M drifted apart too, but yours was the more graceful parting. I vowed never to get married again.

 

Then, living in Montana, I met Jill, and I fell in love with her. And I came to suspect I was only really (sort of, kind of, halfway) cut out for one occupation: to be a teacher. I’d tried a number of other things I had no aptitude for. I wrote and wrote, hoping for some kind of breakthrough. You were the one who escaped the classroom, although in a sense you have been a teacher all your life, in Minnesota, where the outdoors has been your classroom, a big place. You got serious about running again, only once you had enough to eat you gained seven or eight pounds. You met a woman named Judy. It made me happy to imagine her.

In Belize, we’d grown used to going long months without communicating with friends and family. In our new worlds, miles apart, we met new people, we tried to get better at our jobs, we wrote letters like this one. I can hardly imagine how we made do with typewriters and number two pencils and yellow legal pads. Remember how our letters arrived on the thinnest sheets of paper? So we could save on postage. And we waited with keen anticipation for return mail. I spent years without a television. I haunted the public library.

 

When I married Jill, I hoped there was still time for me to learn how to be a husband. She and I loved Montana, and because we loved it, we knew we had to leave. There are people who won’t understand that. I think you will. Two weeks after we got married, when Jill and I flew to China to teach at the university in Tianjin, I wasn’t sure if moving to Tianjin was a step in the right direction but it was a step in some kind of direction. In 1985, China was only a handful of years into her great opening up to the west. We made so little money there, if we called home we had to reverse the charges, and the two times I tried it, I called at the wrong time of day, the wrong time of night. My parents answered, groggy and confused. It was better not to call. It was better to write letters.

Jill and I traveled the length of the people’s republic by train, over to the Gobi desert, out to Tibet, down along the coast to Shanghai and Guangzhou. You and Judy must have felt the desire to be on the move too. You bought those bicycles and mapped out your yearlong cycling tour,  Australia and New Zealand. You wrote to me just before you left, how you were packing the bicycles in giant cardboard boxes and flying first to Tahiti, then points beyond. I envisioned you putting the bikes together outside the first airport, imagined you remembering the little things you must have left sitting on some shelf in your garage.

Jill and I spent a year in Tianjin, another year in Qingdao. We made plans to go to Taiwan where the pay was supposed to be better. We were living on the tail end of a magical time when moneyless expats could travel from one Asian country to another, earning their way by teaching conversational English. But that life had turned gritty, and it made us wonder about all of our choices to date. On the other side of an immense ocean, you and Judy were on the move. And in China, Jill and I were on the move. Different continents, different modes of travel.

 

So much has changed in one lifetime. Jill and I traveled by bus to Tibet, by train to Hong Kong, where, for the price of one-way plane tickets out of the country, we smuggled unfamiliar musical instruments into the other China, Taiwan. When it was time to move on, we left Taiwan for Bangkok, where we rode the rivers in rooster tail boats and let ourselves be pedaled around the city by incredibly fit young men on their bicycle rickshaws. I imagined you and Judy riding your own bicycles along coastal highways, taking tea in the afternoon, smiling your way into the hearts of people lucky enough to spend time with you.

I don’t know when you and I decided it would be a good thing to meet up somewhere, to introduce our beautiful patient partners to each other, to reconnect after being disconnected for the months that had turned into years. Jill and I were out of time, our funds dwindling. She had applied to graduate school in Ohio for the fall. It was out of the question for us to fly to Australia. And you and Judy had jobs waiting for you back in Minnesota. And family, a life. The challenge of stashing your bicycles somewhere, securing visas to China, adding a major dogleg to your travels, how daunting that must have been.

Whose idea was it to meet in Singapore? People spoke English in Singapore, which would make things a little easier for all of us. It was as far south as Jill and I could imagine traveling, and as far north as you and Judy could stretch your plans. The four of us, moving in parallel universes from city to city, from country to country, tried to hold fast to that hope of a grand week together in Singapore. By then, Jill and I were never anyplace for longer than a few days. Hong Kong, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Tioman Island, points in between. You and Judy were cycling from town to town, and our only way to communicate with you was to send a letter to the place we hoped that letter would find you next. In Hong Kong and again in Bangkok, Jill and I went to the main post office and stood in line at a small window labeled Poste Ristante. I showed a series of different young men our passports, and if I was lucky, one of them shoved a letter at me that you had written a few weeks before. Jill found a quiet corner of the post office to write long entries in her journal that she would not show to me, while I scribbled a note back to you and sent it off to the next possible stop on your meandering travels.

 

 I am sometimes reminded of two complementary signs I saw at the small airport in Tibet: the first sign read, “For the Organized Travelers,” meaning, of course, that those people who had signed on with an organized tour should get in line there and wait patiently for someone, anyone. The second sign said, “For the Disorganized Travelers.” Without a word to each other, Jill and I had lined up behind that second sign.

In a guide book, I found a listing for a famous watering hole in Singapore: Raffles. Just reading about the place, I felt immersed in the years of Empire and embarrassment, but I also wondered at the thought that I might lean up against a hotel wall where Kipling or Somerset Maugham had waited for a friend.

I wrote to you:

We will look for you on the third Sunday of May at Raffles, at The Long Bar, six p.m. local time. I wonder if this can possibly work.

 

I sent the card via Poste Ristante to Brisbane. Then I sent an identical card to Canberra.

 

It was unrealistic to assume that trains and buses and airplanes would run according to schedule, that nobody would stumble as they crossed a busy street, that none of us would get robbed, that relatively new marriages would hold together for a few added weeks, an extra month. I spent three days in a hospital in Malaysia with a mild dysentery, eventually checking myself out when I was sure I didn’t have typhoid or typhus or some other word that started with a T. Jill and I slept in a one-room thatched hut on a beach in Thailand where I wore a sarong, marveling at the thing, packing it away in the bottom of my backpack before we headed for the next bus stop, fairly sure I would never wear a sarong again. When Jill wore a sarong, I could not take my eyes off her.

We traveled south toward Singapore on brand new buses with video screens showing loud, inappropriate, mesmerizing videos of American professional wrestlers. I understood then your great advantage: the bicycles. Jill and I had been warned that if we weren’t vigilant, drug smugglers would slip onto our bus and plant drinking straws filled with heroin in our backpacks. They would wait until we arrived at our next destination, then steal our bags and reclaim their stash. If the drugs were prematurely discovered on us, we could be imprisoned, executed. We rode long hours with our bags in our laps. I vowed I would never again take a bus across the border from Thailand to Malaysia.

 

All of this, the events I’m writing about, took place forty years ago. So many things have been added to our lives: cell phones, laptop computers, the date we have named 9-11, the wars that followed, the political disfunction in the United States and elsewhere. We raised our families, and Jill completed her graduate studies, and I quit teaching forever, then returned to teaching, vowing to stick with it this time, to do right by my loved ones. Judy and Jill became great friends, sharing their joys (children) and their fears (children again) and their disappointments (never the children). All four of us eventually aged out of the jobs we’d devoted so many years to. Our children grew up and went to living on their own. They have their own partners, their own stories.

I could not have foreseen which one of us would first pass into the mystery. You remained thin and fit into your seventies, and Judy, the youngest of all of us, had good genes. Jill was in many ways the healthiest, the one most devoted to careful eating and yoga. I fell ill for a while but I recovered, and just as I began to feel strong again, it was Jill who left us, and in the space of a few days. It was unexpected and a more terrible loss than anything I could have imagined.

I have pictures now, and somewhere I have letters addressed to Poste Ristante Hongkong, Poste Ristante Taipei, Poste Ristante Singapore. I have memories filled with kindness and beauty, none of those memories more wonderful to me than that late afternoon, sitting at The Long Bar at Raffles, looking up and seeing you and your Judy in the doorway, the expression of amazement, the look of youthful certainty, the smiles on your faces that said, Of course we’re here, we’re all here. Didn’t we plan it just this way?

 

Your friend, always,

Barry