All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [65]
Back home in San Francisco, other people notice a change as well. At a party, a man who has known me for twenty years, with whom I’ve had a tumultuous and long-ago steamy relationship, wants to know what is different about me and tells me I seem “softer.” I don’t think anyone has ever called me soft before. Kathy, on a hike, is full of sympathetic joy for all the happy revelations I’ve made. I manage to maintain this peaceful aura for weeks, even on a trip to stressful, fast-paced, career-anxious New York City. There I visit an editor I’ve known for years, who’d been on staff at a magazine where I once had an altercation with another editor and imprudently used the F-word, a sin for which I was forever banned from those pages, even though I’d been a longtime contributor. “You seem changed,” she tells me. “Quieter, calmer, more relaxed. It’s nice.”
After the meditation retreat, I am nice, which ordinarily is not one of the first words even my dearest friends would use to describe me, but I realize that lovely state of sweetness and calm wears off if you don’t renew it by meditating some more. Otherwise, you start yelling in traffic again, screaming at some asshole who can’t hear you to Learn to Fucking Drive. Meditation, unfortunately, is not like a vaccine against impulsiveness, it’s more like exercise, which you have to do at least a few times a week in order not to slip back into your old irritable, impatient self. That’s why they call it practice.
I probably can’t get that lovely beatific glow back, where children, rattlesnakes, and strangers are drawn to my preternatural goodness and calmed by my presence, not without another ten-day silent retreat. But I can sit a few minutes a few days a week to make sure my pause button still works.
In the midst of all that meditating, I nearly forget I am on a campaign to find a boyfriend by forty-five, when I will be officially middle-aged. It seems to have lost its urgency. Meditation does seem to help me deal with men; all my encounters seem less dramatic and personally corrosive.
When I start dating Evan, it is easier to let go of my usual anxieties about whether he likes me enough, has all the necessary characteristics I need in a partner, and whether we are going to end up happily ever after. I can appreciate who he is, full of sunny energy, enjoy taking a hike with him and his dog, and make dinner later on, not worrying so much about how or if things will develop. I have a little space to check in with myself for a change—what’s up with this guy, how does he make me feel?—not just react to how I think he is thinking about me. I am less judgmental about him and simply notice him, whether I really want him to be my boyfriend or whether I’ll have to continue my campaign.
After we’ve been dating a couple of months, I land an assignment to go to Peru to write about its new, hot cuisine with my friend Guillermo. Evan isn’t exactly jealous that I’m going with Guillermo—I tell him the truth, which is that we’re strictly friends—but he isn’t thrilled either. I remind Evan that he said he wanted to travel with me and invite him to meet up with me in Peru after Guillermo leaves. To my surprise, since he has traveled very little outside the United States, he immediately agrees.
Guillermo, who is Peruvian, cooked up an idea with me to eat our way around Lima’s best restaurants and have a magazine foot the bill. Since he left the country, during the era of the Shining Path terrorism, Peru’s varied cuisines have become more sophisticated, mostly as a result of some young chefs who departed around that same time and returned with new, European-inspired techniques and an urge to rediscover traditional dishes and ingredients that ranged from the Andes to the Amazon.
Guillermo is excited to return to Peru