MAPPING MY LIFE
I was the small triangular yellow flag pinned to the large world map hanging on the wall above the bed in my sunny bedroom in the home where I grew up.
My father, mother, and half-brother were blue, green, and red on that same map—the one place the four of us were always together during my childhood.
As the yellow flag, I was mostly stuck in Los Angeles. The red flag, my half-brother, had staked its claim in Albuquerque. Four years before I was born, Barrett had gone there for college in self-chosen exile from the celebrity upbringing that he felt lucky to have escaped. Red rarely moved.
Green and blue, my mother and father, were in constant motion.
Whenever I received a postcard of a painting, a cute animal, an airplane, or a hotel with arrows pointing to Mommie and Daddy’s room—the back covered with my father’s flowing script and plastered with exotic stamps picturing rare birds or crowned kings and queens—I was allowed to stand on my bed as my nannies helped me figure out where to move blue and green. I traced my parents’ path both on the map and in my mind.
I was nine years old when we moved out of that house and the map came down. But its imprint remained. As the years passed, green moved less, though my true blue father never ceased his restless roaming around the globe. As for yellow, I went on to leap from Denver to Chicago to New York, from London to Paris to Switzerland. By then, I had come to view myself and my family geographically—defined, as much as anything, by our places on the planet.
I had already begun imagining the future road trip of my own life.
Oslo, Bangkok, Kalamazoo, Peoria—I loved the places with the funniest names. London, Madrid, Rome, Venice—I pictured the day when I would find myself there, standing in the square covered with pigeons, which my father had told me he fed. Looking up at the huge stone lions with the crossed paws my mother said she loved. Someday, my father wrote, I will bring you here. Someday, my father wrote, we will visit together. I miss you, my father wrote. I can’t wait to be here with you. Someday.
In the road trip of my life, I have been chasing that Someday for as long as I can remember.
I adored my peripatetic father, so I modeled what has become my own nomadic life on his wanderlust. I longed to see the world through his omnivorous gaze, learn the secrets that he carried in his curious mind, discover the treasures he told me about in story after story. In fact, my mania for motion, which has become the leitmotif of my life, derived less from our voyages to glamorous world capitals and far more from the pure joy I always found when my mother, father, our dogs, and I would clamber into our brown milk truck of an RV—heading toward places invisible on the known world of that map above my bed.
The best parts of my childhood were spent on the family trips to Native American reservations we visited for my father’s work on the Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board, or stopping in the tiny towns between the national parks my mother longed to see. The unmarked empty spaces between the bigger dots became the glorious wide-open world where everything our lives were supposed to look like got magically forgotten, as we became a family fully present together in the beauty and infinite possibility of the road.
When we returned to Los Angeles, it was to the 9,000-square-foot Spanish mansion my parents called The Big House that served as their office, architectural project, museum, and entertainment venue as much as our home.
Resembling more of a Grand Hotel than anything else, it was filled with a whole cast of characters: all the litters of my mother’s Standard Poodles; my Dad’s beloved mutt Joe; my Skye terrier Paisley (who came and then went when her bad habits proved to outweigh her good); Puffie the pug; innumerable goldfish in three ponds; an ever-growing family of turtles; a passel of screaming peacocks; a rooftop dovecote of pigeons; a hexagonal aquarium of tropical fish; an aviary of colorful chatty parakeets; our houseman, Harry; our laundress, Olean; my Uncle Hank; my nanny of the moment; Dad’s secretary, Wawona; a security guard named Vic; and of course my sometimes-present father and my always-busy mother.
On the road, all that fell away.
My mother’s miraculous metamorphosis—from self-appointed taskmaster of our lives to fellow traveler—took place the moment we left the L.A. city limits. My dad remained, as ever, our driver. Literally, figuratively, and metaphorically. His infectious enthusiasm for every single thing fueled, guided, and carried us through every journey. I was the navigator, neck massager, and convenient excuse for any childlike adventure and delicious detour, my mom the photographer, the nature lover, the awed observer of every glorious vista. Each with our self-chosen roles, together as equals.
We roamed far and wide—on and off the beaten track. Through obscure museums, past picture-postcard vistas, into one-stop-sign towns with silly names, and along endless stretches of empty road. My mom, my dad, our dogs, and me. Together. Away from constantly ringing telephones, fancy clothes, the never-ending letters-needing-responses world of movie people.
Out there, on the road, we met real folks who lived in a real world of cornfields and horse ranches and diners. Out there, on the road, we felt like real folks who lived in a real world of family and friendship and fun. Out there, on the road, where I felt like my truest self, I found home. Out there, on the road, I lived in Love and left fear in our rearview mirror. This was where my joy thrived.