Love at the Speed of Email Read online

  Love At The Speed Of Email

  Lisa McKay

  Praise for

  Love At The Speed Of Email

  “Love at the Speed of Email is part grand romance, part travel memoir and part essay on life’s most precious gifts. Lisa McKay is a phenomenal writer; clever and comedic, poignant and pitch-perfect. You will love this love story.”

  – Susan Meissner, award-winning author of The Shape of Mercy and A Sound Among the Trees

  “Love at the Speed of Email, Lisa McKay’s engrossing memoir about life and love and home, is a wild ride that spans the globe. At turns funny, contemplative, and romantic, Lisa’s story resonated on many different levels and kept me eagerly turning pages, hoping for a happily-ever-after ending to this modern day fairy tale. I can’t recommend this extraordinary book highly enough!”

  – Nicole Baart, bestselling author of Far From Here

  “A travel memoir with a deep soul, Love at the Speed of Email takes us around the world but always brings us back to the heart of the matter: humanity’s longing for place, purpose, faith. Lisa McKay’s seamless storytelling helps us find ourselves in every corner of her globetrotting and even learn a little about love along the way. A true pleasure for the journeyer in all of us!”

  – Leeana Tankersley, author of Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places

  “Love at the Speed of Email is a riveting memoir by a talented author and globetrotter. I loved journeying with Lisa McKay as she sought the love of her life and a place to call home. I can’t recommend this beautiful and triumphant story enough!”

  – Gina Holmes, award-winning author of Crossing Oceans and Dry as Rain

  Love At The Speed Of Email

  Lisa McKay

  Copyright 2012 Lisa McKay

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable, right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced to any other information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this text may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Visit www.lisamckaywriting.com for more information.

  Love At The Speed Of Email is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Cover design: Kimberly Glyder

  Author photograph: Kevin McIntyre

  Photograph of Michael Wolfe and Lisa McKay: Tristan Clements

  For Mike, who wrote a letter and changed my life

  Contents

  Spinsters Abroad

  Alternate Lives

  In The Beginning Were the Words

  Airports and Bookstores

  Icicles in Heathrow

  Chasing Silver Dollars

  The Internal and Unwinnable War

  The Valley of the Shadow of the Golden Dome

  Hope Chases Us

  Pouring Sunshine and Rain

  The Chicken Dance

  Love Long Distance

  Shock and Awe in Love

  Upon Hearing the News

  The Day Before

  Acknowledgements

  From the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu

  Spinsters Abroad

  Los Angeles, USA

  Almost two weeks after my thirty-first birthday, the alarm on my mobile phone went off several hours earlier than normal. It was still dark when I opened my eyes, and as I groped for the phone I was seized by the sudden and horrible conviction that I had entirely forgotten I was supposed to be getting up and going to the airport.

  This, I realized, could be worse than the time I booked my ticket to New York for the week before I needed to leave. It could be worse than the time I traveled to Colorado before discovering that I’d left my wallet in my gym bag at home. Surely, though, it couldn’t be worse than the time I was stranded in Germany for a week because I’d neglected to get a visa for the Czech Republic. Could it?

  When I finally managed to illuminate the screen on my phone, a Task list was displayed. There was only one item on it.

  That item was Lisa’s wedding (Australia).

  This did not immediately clarify things for me.

  If the phone alarm was going off that early, I reasoned, still sleep-fuzzed, I was supposed to be going somewhere. According to my To Do list, however, that somewhere was Australia. For my own wedding.

  Except … I was having a hard time recollecting ever planning a wedding in Australia.

  Or remembering who I might conceivably be marrying.

  Then, slowly, it came back to me.

  Two years earlier, I had been sitting in a California theater waiting for the movie to start. One of my good friends, Robin, had just gotten engaged. She was talking weddings and bemoaning the twin hassles of setting a date and finding a venue. I had constructively suggested that a lot of time and angst could perhaps be saved if you settled those details before you were even in a relationship. In response to her answering challenge to do just that for myself I had named a place (Australia, the closest thing to a home country I have) and a safely distant date.

  Laughing like a loon, Robin had commandeered my phone and programmed in my wedding date for me, complete with an alarm reminder to get engaged three months before the actual day.

  “No worries,” I had said loftily when she explained what she was doing. “Three months will be plenty of time to plan a wedding.”

  Now, three months before that safely distant date, I groaned and silenced that alarm. Whatever had possessed her to think I’d want to start planning said wedding at 5 a.m. on a Friday, I wasn’t sure.

  *

  One of Jane Austen’s most famous novels opens with this sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Now two weeks past the landmark of thirty-one I was starting to wonder whether it was also a truth even more universally acknowledged that a single woman of a certain age and in possession of no fortune of which to speak must be in want of a husband.

  Many of my friends and family certainly seemed to think so – this was not the first time in recent history that I had been ambushed at an early hour regarding the pressing matter of my nuptials. Even total strangers in African airports were in agreement on this point.

  Accra, Ghana

  The interlude with the stranger in Ghana came first.

  I was sitting alone at dawn on a cold metal bench in Accra airport, reading, when he sat down beside me.

  He was tall – that was the first thing I noticed. Easily six-eight, he towered over everyone else in a room that was already full of tall men. His skin was so shiny black, like oiled coal, that the fluorescent light glanced off him at odd angles. His hair was sectioned and bound into a dozen spiky knobs. He wore spotless red and white Nike exercise gear and sported an enormous square diamond in his left ear. He pulled out a portable DVD player and slid in a disc.

  He waited longer than most, four minutes, before striking up a conversation.

  “I am Gabriel,” he said. “What is
your name?”

  I looked up from my book and sighed mentally.

  “Lisa.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nairobi.”

  “Why?”

  “Work.”

  “What work?”

  “I run workshops on stress, trauma, and resilience for humanitarian relief and development workers.”

  I could see that this last sentence didn’t register, and I wasn’t surprised. It usually took some time for native English speakers to fit those pieces together, and Gabriel spoke English with a thick West African-French accent.

  “What do you do?” I said, wondering, as always, what was compelling me to ask this.

  It’s not that I wasn’t interested in what he did – I was especially curious as to where the diamond came from. It was just that I didn’t particularly want to end up chatting at length to yet another strange man in an airport in Africa. But no matter how many times I tell myself that I’m not responsible for reciprocating interest in situations like these, it breaks all the normal rules of polite behavior to give a one-word answer to a question and return my eyes to my book. Five questions is about my limit. After that I usually buckle and return one.

  I learned that Gabriel was a seaman, working cargo ships out of Djibouti. His family was from Cote D’Ivoire but now lived in Ghana. English was his fourth language, and his worst.

  “Are you married?” Gabriel asked me. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  This is why I don’t enjoy chatting with men in airports in Africa.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I lied shamelessly.

  Gabriel did not even pause. This was something I’d noticed with other men, too. Apparently, if my boyfriend was allowing me to wander around Africa unsupervised, I was fair game.

  “Do you like to make friends with the black man?” he asked. “I know some white woman; they do not like to make friends with the black man.”

  Flummoxed, I tried to think. Answering no was out of the question. Answering yes was tantamount to an open invitation to continue this line of questioning.

  I recalled the face of an ex-boyfriend and mentally grafted it onto my hypothetical current boyfriend.

  “My boyfriend is black,” I said.

  Gabriel smiled. “I like to make friends with the white woman.”

  I looked down at my book and turned the page.

  I have received more attention from men in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Most of the time, however, I don’t think it’s because of my sparkling personality. How sparkling can you be when you’re travel-weary in an airport, especially when you’re engrossed in a book? But I’m also not deluded enough to think that these propositions come because of any irresistible physical magnetism I am exuding. Most of the time, I get the sense that when these men look at me – my hair, my eyes, even my skin – what they really see is not brown and white but blue.

  Blue, the color of my passport. Or, rather, the color of both my passports – the Australian and the Canadian one.

  This sometimes bothers me. And the fact that it bothers me bothers me, too.

  My parents spent decades trying to teach me that it’s qualities other than beauty that really matter. I’d say I believe that. Why, then, do I catch myself at times like these preferring that someone approach me because he desires me physically than because he desires my citizenship and all the other qualities it represents – escape, freedom, and relative wealth? After all, physical beauty and citizenship are both, to a large extent, assets bestowed on us as accidents of birth. Objectively, citizenship even has some major advantages over beauty – it tends not to depreciate in value over time, and you have to screw up really badly to lose it altogether. Physical assets, however, are subject to degradation caused by any number of things, like gravity, sun damage, neglect, and the overconsumption of ice cream and takeout Chinese food.

  “Do you do lots of travel for work?” Gabriel asked me suddenly, interrupting my concentrated study of page 231.

  “Yes, lots of travel!” I said, trying to sound busy, mobile, unavailable.

  “I travel lots, too, but when I get married I will stay at home with my wife and our children,” he said, clearly hoping I would take the hint and apply for a starring role in that story line immediately.

  My strategy during these conversations is to be reserved but polite. Rarely will I be confrontational and firmly shut someone down. Sometimes, however, I will run away.

  I dug for the last of my Ghanaian Cedes and headed for the small stall selling bottled water. Then I wandered into the one store in the airport, thinking.

  It’s not that I blame the men for trying, I don’t. I even admire their moxie sometimes. It’s more that I hate the way it makes me feel defensive and objectified when I suspect that I’m simply being seen as a walking one-way ticket to wealth and a better life. But why should I feel any less objectified, or any more flattered, by a man looking for a pretty smile and a tight shirt?

  “Perhaps,” I thought as I stood alone in the airport on that sultry morning in October, “I’ve been coming at this all wrong. Maybe my parents are right. It is other qualities that matter more than beauty – it’s my passports. Maybe I should start seeing them as just as tangible (and more indestructible) assets than my cup size.”

  Behind me a voice called my name.

  I turned and looked up. Gabriel had come to find me, to make sure I’d heard that they had called pre-boarding. He pressed a piece of paper containing his phone number and an email address into my hands.

  “Where I come from we have a saying” he said, “‘My blood met your blood.’ When I saw you here today, my blood met your blood.” He looked at me meaningfully and paused.

  “Then again,” I thought, “maybe I should just invest in a fake wedding ring. Call me demanding, but I need someone to be drawn to my passports, my pretty smile, and my personality.”

  I smiled, awkward, and tucked the slip of paper into my bag.

  “It was nice meeting you, too.”

  Washington, D.C., USA

  Two months after transiting through Washington’s Dulles Airport on my way home from that trip to Ghana, I was back on the East Coast again to spend Christmas with my family.

  Washington D.C. can be a magical place to spend Christmas.

  The last time we had all spent Christmas together in D.C., we were living there during my last year of high school. That year we walked out of the candlelit warmth of the Christmas Eve service and into a still, deep cold. Snow was falling straight and thick from an inky void, the flakes so incandescent they seemed a stately, silent parade of displaced stars. The everyday landscape had already disappeared under a transforming layer of white. I can still remember the paradoxically warm tingle of midnight snow on my tongue and how the sudden shock of all that unexpected beauty kindled a reverential hope.

  O holy night, indeed.

  This Christmas wasn’t exactly like that.

  We were all together. My sister, Michelle, who married her high school love, Jed, was the only one of us still living in D.C., and it was their house we were invading. My parents had come from Australia. So had my brother, Matt, and his girlfriend, Louise. I’d flown over from Los Angeles.

  So we were all together, at least. But on Christmas morning it was dripping a cold, dreary rain that did not even bother to pretend that it might turn to snow. And despite the fact that I was wrapped up in a blanket, nursing a cup of coffee and staring at a positive mountain of presents under the Christmas tree, there were no warm tingles, no reverential hope.

  Instead there was the feeling that we were all trying hard to create a happy Christmas vibe and not quite getting there. It was Louise’s first Christmas away from Australia and she was homesick. Michelle was three months pregnant with her first child and not feeling like eating much, or sitting up. My father was trying too hard to make sure everyone was having a good time, and his anxious organizing was annoying me. Jed, who was periodically calling me by a nic
kname he knew I loathed, was annoying me, too. And I’m pretty sure we were all annoying Jed, who in that moment was probably feeling a bit sorry that we regularly took his hospitable invitations of “come any time” at face value and descended full force upon his house for two whole weeks instead of just the couple of days that normal American families devote to celebrating the Christmas season.

  Collectively we were a bit like an out-of-tune guitar trying to play carols.

  This feeling all-out-of-tune thing is aggravating when it happens after you’ve worked hard to coordinate travel schedules across continents so that you can spend time together. And it’s particularly frustrating when it happens at Christmas, because everyone wants Christmas to be special.

  Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Christmas is a glorious ideal. I love almost everything about it – tiny lights gleaming through a dark and spiky green, the smell of warm sugared cinnamon, the way life slows down and gifts us time with family and friends. I love how the compass of Christmas can point us toward what’s truly important in our lives and how the dawning of a new year directs us to consider whether we are living up to our own hopes.

  And the music … How can you hear O Holy Night sung with passion and not be stirred?

  A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,

  For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

  Fall on your knees! O, hear the angels’ voices!

  O night divine…

  There is something divine about Christmas – in good years, anyway. But perhaps the very glory of the ideal also risks overburdening the actual day. For if Christmas doesn’t quite live up to expectations, you’re not just having a below-average day you’re having it on Christmas, which is ten times worse. It makes you guilty of not only having woken up on the wrong side of the bed but also of transgressing the Ten Commandments of Christmas. For, as we all know, the first of those Ten Commandments is:

  Thou shall feel all happy and holy on Christmas morning. Thou shall definitely not sit on the floor in front of the Christmas tree feeling grumpy and a bit jealous that everyone else has someone to cuddle when all the extra warmth you have is a cup of coffee.

  But there I was, guilty as charged and about to be put to the test with regard to another of the Christmas commandments: Thou shall at all times remember that presents are not the point of Christmas; people are.