Winter Journal

Twenty-one permanent addresses from birth to the present, although permanent hardly seems to be the right word when you consider how often you have moved during the course of your life. Twenty stopping places, then, a score of addresses leading to the one address that may or may not prove to be permanent, and yet even though you have hung your hat in those twenty-one different houses and apartments, have paid your gas and electric bills there, have been registered to vote there, your body has rarely sat still for any length of time, and when you open a map of your country and begin to count, you discover that you have set foot in forty of the fifty states, sometimes just passing through (as with Nebraska on your train trip to the West Coast in 1976) but more often for visits of several days or weeks or even months, as with Vermont, for example, or California, where you not only lived for half a year but also visited from time to time after your mother and stepfather moved there in the early seventies, not to speak of the twenty-five or twenty-seven trips you have made to Nantucket, the annual summer visits to your friend who owns a house on the island, no less than a week each year, which would tally up to approximately six months total, or the many months you have spent in Minnesota with your wife, the two full summers you lived there when her parents were in Norway, the innumerable spring and winter visits throughout the eighties, nineties, and aughts, perhaps fifty times in all, meaning more than a year of your life, along with frequent trips to Boston starting when you were in your teens, the protracted rambles through the Southwest in 1985 and 1999, the various ports where your tanker docked along the gulf coasts of Texas and Florida when you worked as a merchant seaman in 1970, the visiting-writer jobs that have taken you to such places as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, Bowling Green, Durham, and Normal, Illinois, the Amtrak jaunts to Washington, D.C., when you were doing your National Story Project for NPR, the four months of summer camp in New Hampshire when you were eight and ten, the three long sojourns in Maine (1967, 1983, and 1999), and, not to be overlooked, your weekly returns to New Jersey from 1986 to 1990 when you were teaching at Princeton. How many days spent away from home, how many nights spent sleeping in beds that were not your bed? Not just here in America but abroad as well, for when you open your atlas to a map of the world, you see that you have been to all the continents except Africa and Antarctica, and even if you discount the three and a half years you lived in France (where, temporarily, you had several permanent addresses), your visits to foreign countries have been frequent and sometimes rather long: an additional year in France on numerous other trips both before and after the time you lived there, five months in Portugal (most of them in 2006, for the shooting of your last film), four months in the U.K. (England, Scotland, and Wales), three months in Canada, three months in Italy, two months in Spain, two months in Ireland, a month and a half in Germany, a month and a half in Mexico, a month and a half on the island of Bequia (in the Grenadines), a month in Norway, a month in Israel, three weeks in Japan, two and a half weeks in Holland, two weeks in Denmark, two weeks in Sweden, two weeks in Australia, nine days in Brazil, eight days in Argentina, one week on the island of Guadeloupe, one week in Belgium, six days in the Czech Republic, five days in Iceland, four days in Poland, and two days in Austria. You would like to tote up how many hours you have spent traveling to these places (that is, how many days, weeks, or months), but you wouldn't know how to begin, you have lost track of how many trips you have made in America, have no idea how often you have left America and gone abroad, and therefore you could never come up with an exact or even approximate number to tell you how many thousands of hours of your life have been spent in between places, going from here to there and back, the mountains of time you have given over to sitting in airplanes, buses, trains, and cars, the time squandered fighting to overcome the effects of jet lag, the boredom of waiting for your flight to be announced in airports, the deadly tedium of standing around the luggage carousel as you wait for your bag to tumble down the chute, but nothing is more disconcerting to you than the ride in the plane itself, the strange sense of being nowhere that engulfs you each time you step into the cabin, the unreality of being propelled through space at five hundred miles an hour, so far off the ground that you begin to lose a sense of your own reality, as if the fact of your own existence were slowly being drained out of you, but such is the price you pay for leaving home, and as long as you continue to travel, the nowhere that lies between the here of home and the there of somewhere else will continue to be one of the places where you live.

You would like to know who you are. With little or nothing to guide you, you take it for granted that you are the product of vast, prehistoric migrations, of conquests, rapes, and abductions, that the long and circuitous intersections of your ancestral horde have extended over many territories and kingdoms, for you are not the only person who has traveled, after all, tribes of human beings have been moving around the earth for tens of thousands of years, and who knows who begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom to end up with your two parents begetting you in 1947? You can go back only as far as your grandparents, with some scant information about your great-grandparents on your mother's side, which means that the generations that came before them are no more than blank space, a void of conjecture and blind guesswork. All four of the grandparents were Eastern European Jews, the two on your father's side born in the late 1870s in the city of Stanislav in the backwater province of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, subsequently part of Poland after World War I, later part of the Soviet Union after World War II, and now part of Ukraine following the end of the Cold War, whereas the two on your mother's side were born in 1893 and 1895, your grandmother in Minsk and your grandfather in Toronto-a year after his family emigrated from Warsaw. Both of your grandmothers were redheads, and on both sides of your family there is a tumultuous mix of physical features in the many offspring who followed them, ranging from the dark-haired to the blond, from the brown-skinned to the pale and freckled, from curls and waves to no curls and no waves, from stout peasant bodies with thick legs and stubby fingers to the lithe and elongated contours of still other bodies. The Eastern European genetic pool, but who knows where those nameless ghosts had been wandering before they came to the cities of Russia, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for how else to account for the fact that your sister was born with a Mongolian blue spot on her back, something that occurs only in Asian babies, and how else to account for the fact that you, with your brownish skin and wavy hair and gray-green eyes, have eluded ethnic identification for your entire life and have been variously told by strangers that you must be and most certainly are an Italian, a Greek, a Spaniard, a Lebanese, an Egyptian, and even a Pakistani? Because you know nothing about where you come from, you long ago decided to presume that you are a composite of all the races of the Eastern Hemisphere, part African, part Arab, part Chinese, part Indian, part Caucasian, the melting pot of numerous warring civilizations in a single body. As much as anything else, it is a moral position, a way of eliminating the question of race, which is a bogus question in your opinion, a question that can only bring dishonor to the person who asks it, and therefore you have consciously decided to be everyone, to embrace everyone inside you in order to be most fully and freely yourself, since who you are is a mystery and you have no hope that it will ever be solved.

Your birthday has come and gone. Sixty-four years old now, inching ever closer to senior citizenship, to the days of Medicare and Social Security benefits, to a time when more and more of your friends will have left you. So many of them are gone already-but just wait for the deluge that is coming. Much to your relief, the event passed without incident or commotion, you calmly took it in your stride, a small dinner with friends in Brooklyn, and the impossible age you have now reached seldom entered your thoughts. February third, just one day after your mother's birthday, who went into labor with you on the morning she turned twenty-two, nineteen days before it was supposed to happen, and when the doctor pulled you out of her drugged body with a pair of forceps, it was twenty minutes past midnight, less than half an hour after her birthday had ended. You therefore always celebrated your birthdays together, and even now, almost nine years after her death, you inevitably think about her whenever the clock turns from the second of February to the third. What an unlikely present you must have been that night sixty-four years ago: a baby boy for her birthday, a birth to celebrate her birth.

May 2002. On Saturday, the long, highly spirited conversation with your mother on the telephone, at the end of which you turn to your wife and say: "She hasn't sounded this happy in years." On Sunday, your wife leaves for Minnesota. A large celebration for her father's eightieth birthday has been planned for next weekend, and she is going to Northfield in order to help her mother with the arrangements. You...