On the Road and Off My Rocker

The night before we left, I was too excited to sleep. I said goodbye to my parents in the driveway then Margaret's parents drove us up to Winnipeg for a cheap direct flight. The four of us shared hotel room near the airport.

I barely slept so boarded the plane exhausted.

The flight felt long and stuffy. I couldn't sleep. Margaret's meditation course changed locations before we left, so we spent a night in an all-women's hostel in Lucerne, Switzerland. I stared at the ceiling. This was my first experience with jet lag and I had no idea what was happening. I once read that a common technique used in interrogations - and torture - is to disrupt the subject's sleep. I'd gone three nights with virtually no sleep so by the time Margaret and I took four-hour train ride and then a taxi to the the small town of Livigno in the Italian Alps for her school, I was entirely out of it. Had anyone asked, I would have confessed to being an alien spy from planet Mars seeking to snack upon human brains.

Fortunately, no one asked.

Turned out, there was no school. No classrooms. No dormitories. There was only a large hotel. This was where Margaret's meditation course would take place. While she registered and checked in, I sat on the powder blue suitcase my parents won at the church bazaar, utterly exhausted.

The scene was chaotic. About a dozen other foreigners were trying to check in at the same time. Multiple languages were spoken. I understood none of them. Including English. Finally, it was communicated that the six hundred people enrolled in the course would need to be housed in three different hotel locations, and everyone was vying for this particular hotel because it was the site where classes would be held - in the hotel's conference rooms. I think I'd pictured Margaret attending a vine-covered boarding school, like a semi-grown-up version of the kids' picture book Madeline. Reality was an Italian Motel Six.

Okay, the place actually was a charming, knotty-pine paneled ski resort but I was out-of-my-mind tired. All I wanted to do was crash in Margaret's room for the night so I'd have the energy to face finding a place for myself the next morning.

The Italian organizer told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not stay with Margaret, not even for a single night.

"You must get a pen-see-on," he said dismissively.

I'd never heard the word before. He said it was Italian for hotel. A different hotel. I fought back tears as I picked up my suitcase. It probably weighed half as much as I did. Between lack of sleep and jet lag and emotional stress, my body didn't know day from night and I wandered down the steep hill from the hotel lost, as if in a bad dream.

The once sleepy village had in recent years become a skiing destination. But the snow was still months away. The place was deserted in the off season and I was desperate to find a place to sleep before dark. None of the buildings seemed to have signs. They looked like the chalet-shaped jewelry boxes I'd seen for sale in a fancy gift shop at the mall that played music when you lifted their roofs. Only these were real. Maybe. I was, as I said, tired. I spotted an older woman gathering laundry from a clothesline and asked if this was a pen-see-on. She shooed me off, pointing toward the village nestled at the bottom of the hill. I lugged my suitcase a little further down the road. Then I stopped to rest, sat on my suitcase, and sobbed.

A short time later, the director of the meditation course sped past on a road parallel but above me, and honked. His car was stuffed full of people and suitcases. I actually thought he was gloating. But a while later, he pulled up beside me in an empty car, told me I was walking the wrong way, and offered to help me get a room. I fully expected him to expect something from me. But I was too tired to give a damn. I got in the car. Fortunately for me, he was a kind man and did just what he said he would do, and even negotiated a reasonable weekly rate with the older couple who ran a lidless-jewelry-box hotel. The place had three ensuite bedrooms and one dorm room with about bunk beds and a bathroom down the hall. I was assigned the dorm. I was the only guest.

I climbed into the bed furthest from the door and slept for fifteen hours.

The next day, I looked for Margaret to let her know where I was staying. It turned out, the disorganization of the meditation course worked in my favor. They needed kitchen staff. It didn't matter that I had no experience. I'd be tasked with carrying trays of food from the kitchen to the buffet line, bussing tables, and sweeping floors. I'd get no pay but they would cover the cost of my hotel room, my meals, and all the meditation time I could steal. When I told them I didn't meditate but was interested, they arranged for me to learn. The next day, an American woman with an Italian last name invited me to sit cross-legged near her on the floor of a hotel room. She lit a candle, burned some incense, chanted a melody, and whispered my mantra. Then we meditated together.

The twenty minutes of silence did not feel as magical as I'd hoped.

But having a place to live, wonderful food, and a job that meant hanging out with a young international crew was more than I'd even dared hoped.

The universe, as the meditators like to say, was providing.