After 34 months, I leave this country again...

Less dramatic than it may imply... I've decided that there are places that I want to see in this world that actually are compatible with a two week vacation. And so it is, I've booked a flight to Reykjavik for June. Eleven days later, I return to San Francisco.

It's a short space of time - enough perhaps to be able to pronounce city names, but not enough to be able to speak the native tongue with much confidence. It may not be travel to its fullest, but I hope that it will be enough to rejuvenate.

On another metric, the timing is ideal. My good Aussie mate, Phil, will be a few months short of reassignment. His two years on the east coast of Iceland has been potent, and I'm curious to see how it's changed him. He's very much on the cusp - after it's all done, he may stay, he may go back to Oz, or he may pull a rabbit out of his hat. I love talking with people on the cusp. Unfortunately, it won't be an entirely mutual exchange. I'm beginning to realize that I'm going to be here a while.

At least a year more?

Trusty, dusky, vivid, and now true

Sometimes even powerful memories drift severely out of all context. Such is the case for me, in regards to my first encounter with four very potent words.

I can say with comfortable surety that it occured between the age of fifteen and nineteen. I sat in my room and opened a novel whose title I have long since forgotten. I have also forgotten the contents of this novel in their entirety, with one exception: the author made a dedication to Eudora Welty. It was a very short one: "Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true".

My young mind was transfixed by this sequence of adjectives. Then as now, I am normally not one to dwell on introductions, dedications, preambles, prologues, or the such. But these words were worthy of focus. I read them aloud, repeated. Trusty and true, at first appeared synonomous, then stood out distinct. Bookending cousins. In contrast, dusky and vivid presented a paradox. A paradox that I found impeccable for expressing a deep love.

I held this up to such high regard that I began letters to my then-girlfriend with the phrase. I admit doing so with some trepidation. Partly because I wasn't sure she would like the comparison. But mostly because she wasn't vivid at all. And as for the trusty, well, I can only hope the letter was not the reason we broke up months later.

Years later, in a fit of muse, I'd recall the phrase. I decided it deserved a second chance. With some courage, I reintroduced it - into letters to another girlfriend. She didn't drop me nearly as fast, but neither I nor her thought she was particularly dusky.

Over the years,I've met a gaggle o' trusty's, a handful of duskies, a few vivids, and even a few true's, but never altogether. I stood in a bookstore in Mission feeling generally contemplative when I picked up an unfamiliar biography on Chatwin, and read with shock those four words again. According to letters kept by his wife, it was one of Chatwin's personal favorites. Not because he had read the dedication I had. Even better, it's originally from a poem by Scottish traveler, Robert Louis Stevenson in Songs of Travel:

TRUSTY, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble–dew,
Steel–true and blade–straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The mighty master
Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow–farer true through life,
Heart–whole and soul–free
The august father
Gave to me.

So it took eight years for the origins to come to light, but neither is the magic of this sequence dispelled. One day I may even find it's avatar.