3. Bring Out Your Dead Day

A long, long time ago, while standing at the banks of the Ganges, in the year I decided to become a photojournalist, I talked to a woman washing her sari in that holy of holy rivers. As she smashed it against the rocks like she wanted to knock the breath out of it, I asked if she owned many saris.  She replied, yes, I have one I wear and one I wash.  That's only two, I replied, that's not many!  No, she gently argued, that's one too many, as I can only wear one at a time.

Since then, I've been able to pack lightly when I travel, reminding myself that I can bequeath, give or ditch anything in  my pack that weighs me down. If I'm hot, I'll take it off and leave it somewhere for someone who will need it later. I've left books on benches for others to read.  If I'm cold, as I was in Rishikesh, arriving just as the first snows started falling a few years go, I bought a rough but very warm blanket from a sadhu. And when I left Nepal, I passed it on to the porter at the airport, who appreciated it more than the rupees I had for him in my other hand.  And who probably resold it to another cold visitor for a fistful of dollars. Once I even stole a blanket from a hotel for my overland adventure through Patagonia, and returned it six weeks later when I stayed in the same room ... but that's another story.

How you do pack for a year's travel?   Or how do you repack a whole life into 10kg?  It's remarkable how little we need.  I've started clearing out my domestic "stuff". Much was consigned to the verge in the biannual Bring Out Your Dead rubbish day, I started by calling my friends with odd requests like "Do you need a new electric blanket?" "My cuisinare pot?" "Is there room for my mint and basil in your herb garden?" As their answers diminished the level of what, in the past week, has become ballast in my life, my requests became slightly more bizarre.   "Would you wear size 8 fishnet stockings?"  "What about my Coco Chanel wannabe fringed wig with genuine synthetic hair?" "Kama Sutra for Dummies?"  "27 silk scarves - long enough to tie to  ... click.."

Today I've made fourteen trips to the verge, carrying this ballast, to join the broken tables, rusty barbeques, three legged chairs and assassinated dartboards that were ditched by my neighbours.  I've caused quite a kerfuffle in the street as a full set of white crockery for 16 fine diners, two tablecloths still in cellophane, a rice cooker, sandwich maker, and a new wok in original wrapping, joined the rubbish.  What will I do with an avocado slicer, apple corer and state of the art garlic crusher in Essoauria?  Can I take the pottery bowl I made, as an unhappy wife with my initials SB snaking around the base, to Bali?  A bag of fat, lopsided candles, melting under their own weight  .... out, damn memory, out!

My apartment - still mine for the next 16 days, has a beautiful hedge of gardenias, but between the lush vegetation I have a birds' eye view of various selections from my kitchen cupboards being dragged home by pedestrians straining under the weight of a vintage knife sharpener,  a lying-through-its-teeth bathroom scale, a dypsomaniac corkscrew and a feline mask with feathers made by an adventurous lover in the good ole' days  ...

Then I started on my clothes.  I have a whole drawer of socks.  I have a whole drawer of leggings.  My assorted origami undies.  I have cashmere from Milan, velvet coats from Vietnam, silk kurtas from Thailand, mandarin jackets from Shanghai, five faded trackpants and a leopardskin uber-cleavage super-push-up killer bra with never-worn matching tonsil extractor (read g string)  from K Tart.  Out, out, out, out.  

I stopped thinking who could/would, have/want them; I stopped worrying if I'd need them for an occasion, I stopped telling myself that one day I would be fat enough to wear them again.   Or stupid enough to crush my toes into them.  Or desperate enough to squish myself out of them.   I bundled them up with my Bollywood-pink towelling dressing gown and some of His Stuff found in the back of a cupboard, crammed them into a plastic bin, and jumped on them like I was stomping grapes in Italy.  Then I played the Rachmaninoff 3, very loudly, because  I  could.

Oh, holy cow, there goes a Storm-junk-gatherer with a kid's stroller filled with my kitchen detritus. Judging by the car that idled to the curb for a sneak drive-by peek, I think the mirrored bedspread from Rajasthan has just gone home to a unit in DeeWhy.

How much do I need?  How little? When will I ever wear the red cape or the black silk throw?   I'm zigzagging from Sydney to Perth in midsummer; then holing out in Kathmandu at winters's end;  via London in spring, I'm overlanding in Morocco through the High Atlas, down to Mali, off to Bali.  And all through this trip, my most important items will be my modem, my laptop and my cameras.  Apart from the most rudimentary of clothing, all the rest is redundant and I can pick up and discard anything I need along the way.  Note to several warring selves: beware the pack that gathers stones while I sleep ... I am Going Bead Buying.

When Marco Polo was getting ready for his Great Big World Adventure, what did he pack? How did he pack?  How do I pack for a year?  What really is important enough for me to keep?  When my mother died I found a box of hundreds of my postcards I'd sent her over the years: this I keep, as they never believe my adventures. But my personal stuff?  Will my children one day unearth my boxes of tricks and find secrets that will destroy them?  Are one person's treasures and secrets another's unhinging?  Do I remove all trace of my personal history now, as I'm about to embark on another slice of my life?

I've always believed I'd be dead at 64.  I'm not being melodramatic;  I just know it. I've had some horrible sicknesses, and last year made me particularly uneasy,  and I wasn't worried or upset about that number.  It is just going to be.   So this clearing out began a few months ago, when I woke up next to David, and realised His Stuff. I had to move on, particularly if I had just a Bit of Time Left.   That's the time too that I knew I didn't want to continue the shop, even though I've made some remarkable friends.  If I ever have a bead shop again (huh? what am I saying?) I'll call it Secret Bimmin's bizness, because of all the tales I've been entrusted with, but that's also another story.  

Anyway, the clearing out began with my being brave enough to ditch 100,000 slides that I'd taken during my years as a travel writer.  I didn't enjoy the process, because I knew that each one was a slice of my life, an experience I'd participated in enough to report on film, probably on paper, and certainly in my mind.  More than that, as I'm primarily a portrait photographer, the act of snatching that photograph allowed me a brief moment into another person's life.  Did I have a right to discard that experience, given in trust?

Those slides took up four large plastic bins on wheels.  I've schlepped them from state to state, from house to house and they're weighing me down.  My nightmares have always consisted of my trying to catch trains, buses, rickshaws and ships with tons of luggage; dreams of leaving camel trains on the sands as I scale the sides of a tanker (don't ask me to explain, it's a dream) ... dreams of being torn between my excessive, spilling, luggage and my journey.  My most persistent dream after I married a man with a Porche (don't ask me, I was young and he was a doctor .. go figure ...) was that I had to try and rescue my mother from a burning house and fit all HER stuff into the back of the Porche, and the new young doctor husband had his hand on the horn, hurrying me, and I was inside this burning house shrieking for my mother who wouldn't come out.  Years, months, many same dreams later, I was finally able to leave her in the burning house with her stuff, and drive off without so much as a by your leave, with the not-so-new-husband, into the sunset. I never had that dream again, but the ones with the tankers and the trains and the luggage persist. 

A few nights ago I dreamed that I'd gone back into my empty house to fetch something and I couldn't get in because boxes of beads were stacked to the ceiling. I've just realised they were filled with gold - I guess I'm onto something postive now.

I was talking about dying at 64.  At dinner the other night, when Luda and I signed a pact to do this Great Big Remarkable Life Changing Adventure together,  she was talking about 2013 being a time of great change, of rejuvenation and rebirth for many people.  I've planned a lot between now and then .. and then I realised ... 2013 will be a time of rebirth for me - reinvention - reincarnation - reestablishment -  and all the crap that has descended on me for so long will thereafter miss its mark.

Yep.

I just have all this STUFF to ditch.   My friend who uses Kathmandu as a base, is an inspiration to me.  He's the most fascinating of fellows, and his most precious possessions are his adventures; his tales, his stories.  He doesn't own stuff because he is based in spots tossed over the world and he needs to travel light, and travel fast when needed.  He is such a generous soul, because he's realised the value of not holding onto ... stuff. 

So now I'm down to one bowl, one plate, one goblet, and one mug. One set of sheets.  Two towels.  Still too many clothes, but I'm working on reducing that.  I've got a definite, a maybe and an absolutely-not-box.   I'm going to eat out every night, until I close the doors on this apartment and leave it forever,  because I've just finished a stint of working harder than I ever have in my entire hard working life, and because I deserve it. And because I can feel myself getting well.

Someone commented that I had lovely eyes yesterday.  Long long ago, while I was sitting at the rooftop restaurant of the Rex Hotel in Saigon, a famous journalist's haunt, a stranger began talking to me (the beauty of solitary travel) and after a few this-happened-to-me and that-happened-to-hims, he said "I don't know how any man could leave eyes like that ..."  It's been a long time since I've looked at my eyes and seen clarity;  too many hours with my head down, too much sadness bordering on madness, and a hint of meanness fed on exhaustion.   I swam this morning in the ocean, and I felt truly happy and alive.  And my eyes are green again.  They've been misery-yellow for a very long time.

I'm travelling again.  Soon.  But I'm travelling.  I'm travelling on these pages.  I'm writing again.  I wrote my first blog after I'd talked to Sarah, because I knew I'd be travelling again.

The wise investor in me tapped me on the shoulder and should'd me .. you should rent out the apartment you know, you shouldn't sell it. You should have a home to return to.  You should keep some of your special furniture, your carpets, your Stuff.

Which is just a whole lot of Wood and Wool.  And someone else inhabiting my money.  

My skook replied - Thou Should Not.