Ten great years

During my first year of teaching English at the Czech Agriculture University in Prague, I wrote to a friend that I wanted to stay in Europe for five years at least. I had that target in mind as a sort of benchmark for success, reckoning that if one can stay outside of one’s home country for that long, then any eventual return could be undertaken with dignity.

So now, with a marriage and ten years of European living behind me, I find myself faced with the prospect of returning to the United States for an indefinite period. Success? Failure? Depends on who you talk to.

Our friend Peter, for example, could simply not bear the thought of us moving back to the U.S., and did his best to talk us out of it. “What is there,” he once pleaded, “but guns and no vacation days?”

Our friends Marc and Anne, however, were almost giddy with excitement for us, and their enthusiasm for our move definitely helped us during our times of indecision, of which we had many.

Which is easy to fathom, because if 39 year-old Jim were to meet 29-year old Jim and tell himself that in 10 years time he would be married to a kind, beautiful woman, that he would be living in Spain, and that he would be a freelance editor and writer who frequented the beach, well… 29 year-old Jim would certainly be hard-pressed to come up with a more appealing scenario.

But as great as life abroad can be, there are always doubts in the back of one’s mind that living at home might be just a bit better. For example, in Spain we didn’t have any personal transportation, aside from bicycles. Which is great for our carbon footprint, until you consider that we flew over 10 times to visit home or friends this past year, which put that carbon footprint well over the Sasquatch range.

So we’re looking forward to having a couple cool cars in the States – say, a Dodge Challenger?

Then there’s the accommodations question: it’s true that a lot of our friends have spacious and modern apartments in Seville, but we opted for traditional Spanish, meaning long on appearance and short on space functionality. Oh, everything worked, but the shoddiness of the workmanship was getting a bit difficult to bear, especially when it rained and I had to continually mop around the doors.

So of course we’re looking forward to an all-American McMansion as well.

There are a lot of things we’ll miss, naturally. European style, culture and languages are something that I was just getting the hang of. And this is to say nothing of the beautiful architecture here.

On the way to the Brussels airport last week, our good friends from Berlin said to me, “Well, you had ten great years in Europe – perhaps the next ten in the States will be even better.”

To which I replied, “That’s what we hope for.”