Diary

I love living in Victoria, and when I am away I always look forward to coming back home. That’s why I have always been surprised by how returns bring with them a touch of depression. 

I have attributed this to many things, most obviously jet lag, which makes me so unlike myself for a few days.  Occasionally on leaving a ship where the crew have made it feel like a second home, I feel a bit bereft. And then there’s the need to figure out how to manage the complications of a life where I am not being taken care of hand and foot, day and night. It’s amazing how quickly I can forget where a light switch is, or where I keep the coffee filters. And now, all the things that had to wait until I got home suddenly need to be scheduled and done. 

This time, add to all that the horrific results of the election, the vestiges of a touch of food poisoning, and the brief loss of my luggage, to make this return additionally besieging. But this morning, around 4am, my typical wake up time during jet lag recovery after bedtime at 8, I put my finger on why, even with easier returns than this one, I feel so out of sorts. 

I have written here many times in the past about my decision to uproot my life and move to Canada in 2020. For any readers who didn’t know me then, in order to do this, I sold my condo, got rid of all my furniture and any possessions that wouldn’t fit in my car and drove to Victoria, sight unseen and knowing no one, trusting it would work out. I now live in a furnished heritage rental, with the world’s best owners living upstairs. I own nothing now except my clothes, jewelry (lots of earrings!) and my car. I don’t own a lamp or a throw pillow. Nada.  Zip.  To my way of seeing it, this is working out very well indeed!

But still, there is something about returning home to an environment filled with the identity of a whole life—from the knickknacks, to the art, even to the favourite dishes, that I no longer get to experience. There’s a moment where you open the door coming home and say “this is my real life.”  I don’t feel that way in part because my real life is also on ships half the year, but largely because any place I live now and for the rest of my life will never really be mine in the same way it was before I flew the coop in my car. 

 I’ve written in the past about nesters and perchers—those who need a comfy place to call home, and those who are fine wherever they are.  I am a percher to the core, but there are those moments when I remember how good it felt to  come home and see everything waiting for me, reminding me of the sum of my life. I don’t have that anymore, and I guess somewhere deep in the gut, it affects me. 

This life isn’t for everyone. For a small percentage of my head and heart, it isn’t for me either for a day or two, while I adjust to the wonderful, unencumbered reality I have made for myself. I made my choice, and I must be at home wherever I am. That soft nest to fall into must be inside me, where my fundamental identity and my most important memories live. The rest is just stuff. I’ve got the right outerwear and good winter shoes, money in the bank, and friends who are there to welcome me home to my life in Victoria, where I already feel much more settled just by writing this. 

These are the words on the tombstone of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and many other works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy. When I was in college, I inhaled every word he wrote and even now, more than half a century later, I still remember his challenge to take on the heavy intellectual and spiritual work required to have a life of true joy and deep meaning. 

The photo below is of me laying flowers on his grave when Jim and I were there in 2008. It was the number one thing I wanted to do when I first visited Heraklion, Crete, where he is buried.  The one at the end of the post is of the epigraph on the other side of his tombstone, carved as he wrote it by hand.

I can’t say I’ve always lived up to the challenge of his words.  I haven’t always tried that hard to do so. But I still think that those few words are the best guidance I ever received. 

Kazantzakis wasn’t arguing against optimism or faith in the future, only against being wrapped up in expectations of favorable outcomes.  Likewise I think what he meant by fearing nothing isn’t that he shrugged off real threats, but that he wasn’t cluttering his mind with imagined unfavorable outcomes.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Kazantzakis was a great admirer of the Buddha, for their philosophies are both grounded in the idea that attachment is the source of suffering. We hope to get what we want and we fear we will get what we don’t want.  We want to keep what we like and get rid of what we dislike. Both are burdens, and feeling burdened is the antithesis of feeling free.

So why am I thinking about this now?  Like pretty much everyone, I am losing  my sense of well being over this election. I am emotionally exhausted with both hope and fear. 

Kazantzakis’ book The Saviors of God was at one point like the Bible for me, and one line has stuck in my memory all these years: “We shine like humble pebbles as long as they remain immersed in the sea.”  I’m sure you have picked up a wet pebble and admired the beauty of its colors, only to pull it later from your pocket to find it grey and dull. Maybe humans are like that too. Forces we cannot control bring out the best in us, revealing our true colors only when we are most caught up in them. 

This is a good time to remember that. The only answer to this terrible political situation is to accept that we are always immersed in the sum totality of what simply is—good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, scary or comforting. Our hopes and fears are tiny and ultimately meaningless battles with the future. Whatever happens, our life’s purpose is to continue to shine. 

Any writer is a word nerd, and I plead guilty. Finding the perfect word or making up a new one lifts my spirits in a way unlike anything else. Another category of word fun is dictionary digging—playing around with a common word that has many meanings, preferably contradictory. 

The other day I was reading an article explaining the world views of Plato and Aristotle. The author, one of my favourite columnists, Arthur Brooks, explained that the fundamental difference between the two philosophers was Plato’s view of reality as a fixed entity and Aristotle’s view that reality is characterized by change. Applying that to people, Brooks’ point was that to Plato, there is a fixed core that defines us, and to Aristotle every individual is perpetually in a state of becoming.  

My guess is that it’s a bit of both. There are ways in which I don’t think I have changed at all.  My desire for social justice, my optimism, my belief that most people are decent and trustworthy are things I have carried throughout my life. And yet, I never have the sense that I have finished evolving into the whole person I am meant to be.  The thing I like most about my life is that I am still growing. 

The Brooks article got me thinking about the word “becoming.” Maybe it sounds a little old-fashioned now, but I grew up hearing it used for appearances and actions. “That dress is very becoming,” someone might say, or the opposite, “that behaviour is not very becoming.” What in the world is an article of clothing or an infraction of manners in the process of becoming?  How can that word possibly apply?

Online Cambridge and Webster say “becoming” is an adjective that means attractive and suitable, and that is pretty much the end of the discussion. Nothing of philosophy at all in the word. I looked up the verb “become,” and I found a much longer and interesting history. Old English “becuman” meant “to come (to), approach, arrive, enter, meet with, fall in with; happen, befall; befit.”

Okay, I get the connection with befitting, but the rest of the meanings seem almost comical. By this standard, saying an outfit is becoming is rather like saying “that dress shows you are making progress towards a sense of style.”  Or perhaps, in this throwaway society one could argue that the only thing an article of clothing is becoming is landfill.  Then again, to say slurping soup is unbecoming does get at the idea that such behaviour is heading in the wrong direction.

Ah, vocabulary.  The stuff of endless weirdness. Time to give up on the dictionary and go back to Aristotle and Plato. Maybe one part of a satisfying life is to have a clear sense of what about ourselves we never want to change—our core identity, as shown in how we behave and what we believe. Maybe the other part of that satisfying life is feeling that we continue on an exciting trajectory of growth and change. Josh Groban  said it best in “Let Me Fall”

Someone I am is waiting for courage

The one I want, the one I will become will catch me

What a great image.  We jump and the person we become in jumping is the one who catches us. There’s a Laurel waiting for me whom I haven’t met yet.  It may not be an easy path to her. There are occasions to rise to, choices to make. The Platonic side keeps me grounded, but the Aristotelian side reminds me that only if I jump can I find my wings.

Sometimes I get so busy that I forget I have a blog, and I’m surprised to see how long it has been since I posted. When the leaves are falling and the last posts are about springtime, that is quite a stark reminder of how time can pass.

I wrote what I am posting here over a week ago, when I had just arrived in Lisbon. A glitch had kept me from accessing my website until just now. I’m now at the end of the first leg of three, and have been to ports in Spain, France, and now Italy. Here’s what I wrote as I was just setting out:

I’m in Lisbon tonight, preparing to begin a month-long assignment with Silversea in the Mediterranean.  I travel so much that I’ve learned to let the bodily adjustments of crossing eight time zones in one day just be what they are. Now, in the predawn hours, I am predictably awake and have been for a while. I tell myself I’ll just take a nap this afternoon and then I’ll be fine.  Maybe that will be the case, and maybe it will take longer, but I don’t really care. 

As I lay awake, I thought of my son Ivan, now of blessed memory, and something he once said that has stuck with me for years and feels like a real gift. He said when he couldn’t sleep, he would remember all the times he had stood in an interminable line, or had to keep slogging dead tired through something, and all he wanted was to lie down. He would think about where he was at that moment, safe and comfortable between sheets, with a pillow under his head and a blanket keeping him warm , and being unable to sleep didn’t seem all that bad. 

On my flight over, I put in a bid to upgrade to business class and it was accepted. I don’t sleep well even with a lie-flat seat, but the coziness makes the long flight so much more pleasant. Except this time. The seats were bigger and more adjustable, but there was just a little extra space and no barrier for privacy between passengers.  When I laid the seat flat, it was about as comfortable as lying on a a mesh lounger by a pool—hard and with the hinge parts sticking into my back and ribs. I paid extra for this? Premium economy would have been 95% as good. Still, I channeled my son’s message and thought that at least I wasn’t upright in standard economy for ten hours. 

So here I am now, doing inventory as I wait for signs of light outside. I am done with the hard part, which is simply getting here.  My luggage arrived with me. Around noon today I will board a luxury ship and be taken care of for a month. I get to teach appreciative audiences what matters most about each of our parts—a little history, a little art, a little culture. I have a chance to dress up in ways that I never do in Victoria and that is very fun for me. I get to spend a day in all sorts of fun places—Barcelona, Palma, Monte Carlo, Kotor, Corfu, and on and on.  I won’t see a dirty dish in a sink or change a sheet for a month. I will make new friends among crew and guests. 

What’s a little missed sleep compared to all that?

If I were starting a band, maybe I’d call it The Grateful Sleep-Deprived. Doesn’t have the same panache, but I know the tune. 

When I was flying to England three weeks ago to begin a research trip before embarking on a cruise assignment, I found myself thinking about the most painful flight I ever took.  I was in Florence finishing a sabbatical in 1999,  when I got the nightmarish phone call that my son Adriano was dead. 

The struggle to get home at the Christmas season was horrendous. There were no flights from Florence so I took an overnight train to Frankfurt, the only airport where I could find a plane going to San Diego, carrying what I could fit in two suitcases and leaving everything else behind. A glitch at the airport  (I’ve forgotten what) resulted in a public meltdown I don’t think I have equaled since.  Then on the plane I spent hours  staring into space and crying quietly. 

I looked over and saw a young couple playing with their baby, who looked a little like Adriano at that age, and it ripped my heart open. Shortly before we landed, I saw they had changed him into a cute outfit, presumably to meet important people on the other end. It was exactly what I would have done. They were clearly besotted with their baby boy, and it brought back memories that even in my grief gave me a moment of recollected joy.  That young mother was me. That baby was my baby. It hurt, but it also gave me a moment to experience something other than the horror of how my story with my son had  ended. 

 I got to thinking about how time passes, remembering  that plane ride so many years later.  That baby would be twenty-five now. That mother is probably having hot flashes and fussing over her graying hair. And what about all the other people I have interacted with in passing?  The mother with the two little girls who was struggling to get through a flight alone, whom I helped by playing with her younger one?  That little girl would be in her thirties now.   The young orthodox Jewish man who was headed with his young children to Israel  is probably a grandfather now. The man with whom I ended up having a year-long love affair was enough older than me that I don’t know if he is even still alive.

And i—well, I am that many years older now too.  

I was thinking about time on a much grander scale when I visited the archaeological site of the Neolithic village of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands a few days ago. This village was inhabited well over two millennia ago. At the time, every human being there was living in the moment, doing what needed to to be done, taking what pleasure could be had, and persevering through whatever pain life brought. 

It’s funny how relative the passage of time is. We are plopped into this world at a particular point and we go through our lives as if the only time frame that is relevant is our own.  I once heard someone say that for every person the year zero is when he or she was born and everything else is “the past.”  Likewise, I don’t think we can fully comprehend the reality that someday we will simply not be here at all.

That baby on the plane might be a father now, taking his baby to meet his grandparents, once the young couple on the plane. Their whole lives have been, and continue to be lived, while to me their reality is a moment frozen in time.   All the kids I went to school with are in their seventies now, if they have made it that long. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why people feel so ambivalent, or even negative about class reunions.  Perhaps it is too much of a shock to realize that other people have lived all those years too. 

There’s no lesson here.  We all just keep hurtling through space and time and occasionally we bounce off each other. Sometimes we contribute to the meaning that other people make of their lives. Sometimes we are lucky enough to make what feels like a lasting connection, even though in the  larger framework, nothing lasts. I guess we have to settle for that. 

A few days ago, my ship stopped in Cabo San Lucas.  I am not a fan of the noisy, characterless places that most big tourist ports in Mexico have become, but I wanted to get off the ship for a while, so I got on a boat going for a few hours to some bays that were at least less crowded. The other guests and I were having fun on a beautiful, sunny afternoon when suddenly we heard commotion from another boat near us. A man was floating, unmoving and face down in the water, and several people had jumped in to drag him back on board. 

On the deck, a woman immediately began furious CPR, which lasted what seemed to be a long time.  Nearby, someone—daughter? wife?— was sobbing in the arms of another. The woman giving CPR stood up.  It was hard to imagine how that could be a good sign, since no one was hovering around in the way they might if the victim had been revived and just needed help sitting up.  Very quickly, a marine rescue boat arrived, and from what we could see, they were getting the victim onboard without any heroic measures.  Then they roared off back to port.  I have no idea what happened after that, except what happened on our own boat. 

We were all quiet for a few minutes as we headed back to the pier, but when the crew of the boat put on some dance music and brought out an open bottle of tequila, the mood changed. By the time we reached port, it had gone from somber to downright rowdy—dancing, swinging around a pole holding up the awning, hugging, laughing.  It was quite a sight to watch, and it got me thinking about something I read years before in one of my all-time favorite books, The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley. I think about his beautiful philosophical musings on nature quite a bit, and I have quoted him more than once in my blog,  but I had forgotten this particular essay, “The Judgment of the Birds.”  

What called it to mind was the way in which the people on the boat were able to put aside what we had witnessed and pick up life again so joyously.  Eiseley remarks on this in connection to watching a raven snatch a newly hatched baby bird from its nest, robbing that little creature of its chance at life.

“ T]here on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak , [S]uddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. […] They cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. […] The black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. 
     “The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.”

Exactly, I thought. Death is hard.  Grief is devastating.  Recovery seems, at least for a while, impossible. And then, there it is again, the need to feel alive, the desire to be joyous, even while the shadow of death hovers so close. 

Life is indeed sweet. The inevitable bitterness makes it sweeter still, when we can finally look away from the darkness. ‘Therefore choose life,” the Bible says. I hope I always do. I hope you always do too.

It feels odd to be writing about daffodils, an early sign of spring in Victoria,  while I am sweltering in Panama City waiting for my cruise assignment to start tomorrow.  Here the plants change with the season by blossoming and bearing seeds or fruit, and then they move on to the green state they stay in most of the year. 

I spent most of my life in Southern California so my acquaintance with seasons there came only through a home high enough in the mountains to get snow and seasonal flowers in sunny spots.  Even in San Diego, the jacarandas in the spring and the poinsettias in the late fall were reminders that plants know what season it is, even if the weather does not.  It’s so different from what it is like to experience seasons in Canada, although  my friends here, mostly originally from places like Montreal and Winnipeg, would laugh to hear me suggest that in Victoria we have what they think of as winter at all. 

There’s something special to me about the season of cold and dark.  Bare trees reveal their history in the shapes of their trunks and branches. If you hear bird song, the singer is probably visible on a bare twig, its nest revealing where the life it brought into this world began. Winter reveals what has already happened, some of it ancient, some of it as recent as a few months ago.

Most of all, I am moved in winter  by the die-back of the bulbs. When I walk through a soggy field, I know they are there under the ground.  They are resting, waiting for the future, for the right moment to come again. I am reminded of the last scene in Emile Zola’s Germinal, where the protagonist, Etienne Lantier, newly freed from a harrowing life as a coal miner, walks across a field knowing that deep beneath him the miners toil away. He thinks how the seeds of rebellion planted in their minds will someday cause them to rise up, but that day still lies in the future. It’s a heart-twisting image, not at all like the gentle slumber of the bulbs, but the potential power of life stirring beneath our feet is the same.

And then, one day I see the first snow drop, the first crocus and after a week or two the first of the many species of daffodils, then tulips.  (The two photos here are from a spot a few blocks from my home.) After that, trees and plants that aren’t bulbs take center stage—cherry blossoms, camas, and in summer the wild sweet peas that warm my heart with memories of planting them as a child. 

There’s much  to think about in the story of the bulbs.  They persevere by hiding. We often see such acts in humans as cowardly. Daffodils don’t stand and fight against summer. They retreat. Back underground they are equally at home.  Their blossoms show us they are there, but the time when they are gone is equally important in their life. They are storing energy, growing, dividing, resting up for what must be very hard work to push up with tender new leaves through winter-hardened soil. Blooming is just one of the things they do, but unless you are a gardener, that is the only way we humans know them. Just as the only way we know each other is in whatever small part we choose to present to the world

 William Wordsworth wrote a famous poem about coming across a field of daffodils dancing in a field. In the poem he is far from there, lying in bed, thinking about how  that experience gladdened his  soul.  ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils.” 

Mine too.  But there is poetry in daffodils even when they are not dancing. Their winter solitude reminds us that it is healthy to have our own.  We can’t bloom all the time, but when we do, there is such joy in it. And when we rest, recover, renew, there is peace in that, knowing that another part of us that loves the warmth of the sun will soon come out to take its turn in the ongoing story of our lives. 

‘You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

I read this somewhere and it has been rattling around in my head ever since. Like any really good philosophical observation, it sends the mind wandering down many paths

My body’s a good one. It hasn’t let me down overall, though it is showing wear and tear after seven-plus decades of excellent service. It’s a body that hadn’t demanded much attention, and only complains when it’s not getting enough exercise or too much of the wrong kinds of food. 

I think of my soul as residing in my body, and my musings about the connection between the two haven’t gone much beyond whether Hindus have the right idea, that the soul uses a body for a lifetime, then trades it in for another to continue its journey, much as one does a broken-down car.  But the more I think about the quotation above, the less sufficient that answer to the body-soul connection becomes. Transmigration of souls may or may not turn out to be true, but it doesn’t address the question of the relationship of the soul to the body it is presently in. 

 I remember the last year of my father’s life, as he wasted away with congestive heart failure. His body became skeletal, his skin ashen and his eyes so large and sunken they seemed haunted. I remember thinking “this body can’t support life anymore,” and his soul was struggling to escape. Likewise when my late-husband Jim was in his last days, I felt the same thing. The moment I realized he was dead, I whispered my congratulations. Cancer never wins.  The soul succeeds in escaping it. I knew what hard work his body had undertaken so his soul could have the only thing it needed—to be free. 

Being in good health has kept my body-soul question at bay because so far they are still in sync. But what if I were debilitated by injury or disease?  What happens to my soul then for the duration of this finite lifetime?  What will my soul’s effort to escape be like if diminished capacity lasts for years? Who will I become? Would  I be able to use my remaining time to grow my soul, or would I just get smaller?  Would I have the strength to accept my body if I couldn’t travel, couldn’t write, couldn’t do the things that nourish me now, the things that present to the world the person I think I am

In his poem “The Oven Bird” (full text below), I Robert Frost ponders this predicament when he asks “what to make of a diminished thing.”  I honestly don’t know. I hope I would be as resilient as my friend Marilyn, who after an injury had a lengthy residence in rehab and a painful, slow recovery of her ability to walk.  She used the time to rethink her life purpose under those circumstances and decided it was  to spread light and joy in a place that had precious little of either. Would I have the same strength?  

Sometimes people don’t. Sometimes they decide, as my sons did, that their soul needs to get out early and give life another try in another place and time. I don’t judge anyone’s soul journey, but hope that mine will take me down a different path. The most I can hope for is that any diminishment of body is more than offset by a fresh blooming of soul, to make the rest of my life a different song, but a song nonetheless.

The Oven Bird—Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

One year ago today my son Ivan was in the last hours of his life. Although his body was not found immediately, I know in my bones he chose the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.  Five hours away as I write this.  

Today has been full of enough distractions tied to my departure for a cruise assignment that some of the sharp edges haven’t cut as deep as they might have. I have spent my day trying not to think of what his last hours were like, but what the message of his life is for me, and what the one overarching message was that I gave to him.

It is really quite simple. All love, all the time.

Today on my electronic photo frame a picture showed up of me beaming as I held him on the day he was born. His innocent face, puzzled by light and sound and the feel of air on his skin was heartbreaking, and I said aloud how sorry I was that life hadn’t turned out the way every mother dreams it will.

The strongest consolation I have is that so many years were wonderful.  It isn’t only about “how it worked out in the end,” as we all are so tempted to see as the only important thing. Wow, if that were really true, we would spend our whole lives in a fog, not knowing how to interpret anything.  I haven’t yet found anything really important that has a clear end. 

Many other photos tell such a different story than the one taking place in his apartment last year, a true hellhole from a long bout with pain from a serious injury, on top of the utter horror of uncontrolled bipolar illness. I look at one after another of the  happy boy-faces of my two sons on my photo frame, and I hear their boy-voices making sense of their world in the most meltingly wonderful way children do.  

I was on the other side of the camera experiencing the truest joy of my life. 

I couldn’t protect them from the world, or the toxic mix of genetic heritage and  marital dysfunction that took down my world and made their futures so much harder to navigate.  But I loved them unconditionally. I look at their faces looking back at me behind the camera and know they loved me the same way. 

Would I bring them into the world if I knew how both their lives would end in the way they did?That has got to be the hardest question the mother of a child who took his or her own life ever has to face.  And I have to ask it twice.  More than twice. I ask it all the time, and every time is a new reckoning. The best I can do is remind myself of all the love that wouldn’t have been in this world if I weren’t me and they were not their beautiful selves. 

All love all the time. 

Never hold back.  Love can bring you to your knees, make you breathless with pain, but it  is the very thing that can bring you through the worst darkness into a life that you can keep living abundantly. Love makes whatever happens survivable.  Love is the only thing in the end that makes any sense to me.  

May 2024 bring many opportunities to love more deeply, broadly, and lastingly. Happy New Year!

I haven’t published a book in the last decade. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing, just that developing cruise lectures and dealing with other life challenges and opportunities took up my time. It was more than that, though. I love to write, but everything else that goes with publishing had worn me to a nub. Plus, in order to commit a year or two to an all-consuming project that often overrides the things I do to maintain my health, sanity, and friendships, I had to feel an overwhelming compulsion to tell a story, and I hadn’t run into anyone who picked me up by the scruff of the neck, deposited me at my desk and said, “write.”

Until I ran into this woman, Aloha Wanderwell.

Aloha Wanderwell, born Idris Hall, walked away from a French finishing school at age sixteen to become the first woman to drive around the world. She drove across Europe, Egypt, India, China, Manchuria, and the United States as part of an expedition led by the charismatic Walter Wanderwell, on roads that ranged from difficult to non-existent in a time when cars were a rarity, and in most of the world dirt paths were the norm. Aloha and Walter eventually married and continued their exploration by driving from Cape Town to Mombasa, and from Buenos Aires to Lima. Her ten years of record-setting adventures came to a sudden and violent end when Walter was murdered in Long Beach, California, aboard a schooner they had purchased to sail around the world. Aloha went on to live into her eighties, but it is her life from childhood on Vancouver Island through the tabloid frenzy over the murder and subsequent trial of a disgruntled fellow traveler that are the focus of my new novel, INVENTING ALOHA, a Spring 2025 release from She Writes Press.

Look her up online and see why I was hooked. And if you can’t wait for my book to learn more, read Christian Fink-Jensen and Randall Eustace-Walden’s fantastic biography, ALOHA WANDERWELL: THE BORDER-SMASHING, RECORD-SETTING LIFE OF THE WORLD’S YOUNGEST EXPLORER. The link to the publisher for ordering information is here https://gooselane.com/products/aloha-wanderwelli. You can use the information to order it through your local bookseller. (Please avoid Amazon, if possible, because by the time they have taken their huge cut on every copy, authors are left with pennies on the dollar.)

I will be updating my website in the next few months, and will let you know when I’ve got more information to share. As always, thanks for your support.