And so on and so forth, to Seville (lunch at El Riconcillo, a bar founded in 1640) and Jerez de la Frontera (sherry capital of Spain), and then the next day to Gibraltar (like writing, less fun in the doing than in the having done) and Málaga, where we dropped off the bikes and spent three days simmering down—swimming in the Mediterranean in the morning, in beer then sleep in the midday, and sangria in the evening.
That first morning in the Mediterranean I stood up to my neck, sighing with the cold until I got used to it. And then sighing for a few minutes more, with relief.
One of those afternoons, Tom and I spent more than two hours at a bar next to our hotel, tediously and laboriously reconstructing the week’s trip, by the day. You would think it would not be difficult, remembering the morning roads and the lunch stops and the afternoon roads and the hotels and the sites seen and the dinners had.
But the days blurred together like months and years and decades of our lives. We had to piece the days together.
By now we’ve probably done enough foolish adventuring, Tom and I. When we were young, we were building our characters by the mile, finding our limits, discovering our curiosity and listening to ourselves think out loud, occasionally startled to notice a Third Guy coming to life.
Now, our trips bear us back into those trips of our youth—force us to be with those young men, again. Those young men who could not have imagined the life they were about to live, because they did not understand their own capacity. Those young men who now look up at the two of us with many emotions—complicated, but best summed up by awe.
In the hours between our rides, we walk and talk and eat and drink, lost in a kind of perpetual, overarching astonishment that we have lived long enough to have amassed lives that still matter to us and that still matter to one another and that are not over yet. “Your dad would be proud of you,” Tom told me casually one afternoon in Barcelona. And then he revised it to say “amazed,” is more like it.
No more amazed than me.
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