Becky and Jim, a spirited sixtyish couple that Gina and I met Day 2 of our Camino, had dropped out.
“I don’t believe it.” Gina alerted me by text when she saw the Facebook post. “They were SO gung-ho.” Just so! Fit, fierce, and committed since the previous year when they had started their walk on the Way only to quit before the finish, Becky and Jim nonetheless were our inspiration. On our arduous climb out of Valcarlos on the way to Roncevalles, it was they, walking with us, who insisted, hey, you can do this! Unlike Carolyn Gillespie and her will for it to be over, we would absolutely love our entire experience, they cheerlead; snoring men, Black Death, or any of the other calamities common to Camino pilgrims past or present: no way would they befall us, they foretold. Gina and I just had that we will prevail aura about us. I received Gina’s news just as Dr. Pappacoda – an Italian married to a Spaniard she met in Portugal before the two moved to France – was choosing which of the four or five languages she spoke to use in discussing Camino with me. This charming veterinarian, settling on half-French, half-English, was, in the vein of Dr. Javier, instantly and over-the-moon smitten with my kitten.
“Oh, mio piccolino!” Forgetting herself she lapsed into her native Italian to squeal at the kitty she held to her heart at his first official “passport” exam – the vet visit that would lay out Camino’s vaccination schedule and begin the paperwork required to fly him to the US. “Che bel micino!” she cooed. “Posso avere un bacino?” Thank goodness Google Translate could tell me she found my little kitty beautiful, and that she wondered if she might have a kiss.
“But why?” I texted my reply as Dr. Pappacoda cooed and kissed and then inserted a thermometer into Camino’s vulnerable don’t touch spot. His piercing screech of shock brought the vet tech running. “Ça va?” she sang in French. Is everything okay….oh! She, too, swooned for Camino’s cuteness. “Mon petit bébé! Mon petit chou!” Over Dr. Pappacoda’s shoulder, she sent love and comfort to the “little cauliflower,” who now hissed and spit at the vet’s indignities.
“Something about a really bad shin splint, so they’re finished.”
Wow. I had no idea that even the fittest and fiercest could find the Camino daunting. First there’s Carolyn Gillespie losing it over what she finds in her alber-goo bunkbed one evening: “There…in the sheet…was the creature of our nightmares,” she reported with some hysteria: “A bedbug. No. Not one, but two ladybird-sized, round, hard, brown, obviously dead, beetly bedbugs.” Then there were Becky and Jim, who trained for months before their walk – hiking, cycling, gym time, yoga – flying home over a sore shin. Trekking the 500-mile Way in four to six weeks – the typical French-route journey – was certainly sounding like an adventure perhaps less…well, fun than Gina and I expected. Hadn’t we come for the fun? Weren’t we there just for the fresh air, change of scene, bit of exercise? True, we shared some desire to feel ourselves seventy and spectacular, or seventy and splendid, or at least seventy and kick-ass. But the Camino was kinda sounding like it was designed to make us question the whole point of life. An entire world’s worth of pilgrims, those who detailed their walks in books and memoirs and postmortems online, summed up such questions to include: Who am I? And, what am I doing here? Not too much was made of, what’s wrong with me? Or, how did I screw up so badly? But still. Here I was, at all hours obsessing over how I would ever, in any café, find a baguette sandwich that did not feature ham – even in France! – when I was supposed to be puzzling out the larger existential conundrum of why I was born. Well, obviously, I was meant to keep kitty Camino healthy and safe until he reached four months old, could acquire his passport, and fly home.
“You’re not missing much,” I texted Gina, “except perhaps bedbugs.” If Becky and Jim were showing us that there was no shame in stepping off the Camino, if only for a moment or a month or until next May, then the answer to who am I? could wait. Instead of seventy and spectacular, next time we return to the Way, we could prove ourselves eighty and electric, or, quite possibly, ninety and nuclear.
“All good! The pussycat is trés bien.” Dr. Pappacoda handed me a preventive worm pill and bid us a warm bye-bye. “Lucky, lucky petit minou,” she cooed and kissed Camino adieu. “I hope you love your new life in pretty Californie!”
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