The certain someone was sitting across from me at the spindly cafe overlooking a softly gray rolling Pacific Ocean. “So what do you do when you travel alone?” she asked.

   “I wander,” I answered, a trifle timidly, aware she was wandering herself into territory I had only sketchily examined myself.

   “You wander. So what are you looking for?”

The year of living alone officially ended on May 4th, and about which and who will follow in coming blogs. Earlier, in March of this year, a friend asked if I’d ever allow myself to be with someone again. ”You don’t have to feel it as a betrayal of Carolyn, you know.”

The scenery west of Denver is breathtaking in the figurative sense. The track conditions west of Denver are also breathtaking, but more in the literal sense of having it knocked out of you by a sudden lurch of the carriage, during which you’d swear the wheels had left the rails.

I didn’t set my expectations too high, as I boarded Amtrak’s Empire Builder at Seattle’s King St. Station bound for Chicago. I’d already gotten an email informing me there’d be a one hour delay due to track work. Hey, that happens. Generally, you don’t learn of airline delays until shortly after you’ve already left for the airport, and you wait out what becomes rolling further delays from the comfort of a straight-backed gate seat, landscaped with squalling children and families traveling with a small petting zoo.

Big ideas get tested out in small increments. The same holds true for idiotic ones. It occurred to me one afternoon, after slinging Claude over my back and almost launching myself into the unsuspecting woman standing behind me, that it might be possible to travel for an extended period of time without a backpack. Just my eVest. The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it became, so the more I liked it.

    What if loneliness is just a bad friend, you know, one you hang around with but know isn’t good for you. I had a visual cue of this idea in the hotel outside of Venice. At dinner I sat next to a man also dining alone. My immediate thought of seeing him, face downward toward his plate, was that he was not dining but eating. And that’s what I’d be doing as I took the empty table next to him. Why not engage him in conversation? (I have the stupidest better angels; they don’t know me at all.) So we both sat across from one another and ate alone.

   My Vancouver friends would tell me that I was staying in probably the worst neighborhood in the city. From the train station to my hotel, the homeless roam their streets. Outside my hotel, the encampments are the transit residences to clusters of people, huddling, sharing and, in general, just looking after each other

The theme that emerges from these pages is “control.” Control, as in to make the tragic events of the sudden death of a spouse of forty years to “unhappen.” This, of course, is what we all face, waking up that first day as a widow or widower. It’s the shock, the denial, the grief, even the self-pity that we all experience in those first days of mourning.

  On May 23, 2017 at 1:07 p.m., I looked at the attending nurse and asked, “Is she gone?” The nurse nodded. At that moment I experienced an emptiness I had never experienced before. Today marks one year since that nurse nodded that Carolyn was dead. I still cry at a sudden memory of her, but as I have since the moment she died, the tears represent both sadness and gladness. Sadness for the years we would never have, and gladness for those precious five that we did. Only the percentages have shifted. Increasingly over this past year the tears have favored gladness, as memories of her are able to bring smiles to my face. Now, the tears that are sad center around thoughts of a life she was unable to live for herself. That’s a sadness I’ll be carrying with me for the rest of my days.

   When Carolyn and I first dated in 1972, the good times lasted six weeks. I came to refer to that halcyon period as the Prague Spring, after the similar period enjoyed by Czechoslovakia back in 1968 before Soviet tanks rolled in on the streets of Prague. And it hasn’t occurred to me until this minute, that this train trip of mine has also lasted as long as both my and the Czech Republic’s previous Prague Springs. But that’s where the comparison ends.