"Voyage" - Journey

Away we go.

We’re on a plane, and we’re leaving for Paris, and we won’t be back for ten months. 

Visas are approved and firmly affixed in our passports. Our home is rented and in good hands. We have an apartment waiting for us in France. The two cars are stored, as is all of our personal stuff, our family photos, my books and records, Auggie’s toys. We’ve said goodbye to family, and to friends. Auggie is nestled comfortably right between us in his own big boy seat, watching Sesame Street in his pajamas.

Packed. Kind of.

We’re on a plane, and we’re leaving for Paris. And we won’t be back for ten months. 

Katy and I have worked for and dreamed of this for over a year. To be perfectly clear, I couldn’t have done this—and probably wouldn’t have even dreamed of this—without Katy. She’s been a driving force behind this, as she is behind most things she puts her mind to. She has everything in front of her and ready and at her fingertips. The logistics of all this is her, much more than it is me. Despite Katy already being a dream come true, she’s helping another dream come true. What a life. 

Classes start for me on January 5. I have only some semblance of what to expect. I’m fairly certain I won’t be the oldest person in my cohort at 39, and I know for damn sure I won’t be the youngest. My classes will be hygiene and food safety, technical skills, product usage, cooking techniques, and a variety of other basic skills—at least for the first three months. In general, I know how to cook. One might even say I’m a pretty good cook. I’ve read a lot of cookbooks—I love cookbooks, especially those that tell you a story to go along with every recipe. I’ve picked up a lot of tips and tricks. I’ve watched YouTube videos about how to cut an onion. What I’m hoping to get is a real education about: knife skills, butchery, sauces, and cooking fish. I am very, very bad at cooking fish. 

I’ve spoken to a lot of you about why I’m doing this—and why now. Until recently I had a steady career in advertising and marketing for the last 15 years. I left of my own free will. This is a change, and one that I know not everyone has understood (that’s ok, you don’t need to). Uprooting my life, along with that of my wife and son, to move to a foreign country where two-thirds of us don’t speak the language very well (in Auggie’s defense, he’s only now getting a grip on English; as for me, we’ll put my 1,300+ day streak on Duolingo to the test). We’re leaving things behind. I wonder if I’ll see my parents again. 

None of this has come easily. There’s not a decision within this trip that was “easy.”

Harrison, our first son, was 17 months old when he died. He was happy and healthy, and then he died. We have done so much to honor his legacy, to give him a life beyond his life, and to keep his memory alive. There’s Harrison’s Orbit at the Glendale Branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, and Harrison’s Endowment with the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation. There are dozens and dozens of Harrison apple trees planted across the midwest, which will turn into gallons and gallons of cider with which we raise an annual toast to him, a boy who should be here. 

Harrison made me a dad. And I’m damn good at it. Certainly better at it than I am at cooking fish. And I had no proper education, except what he taught me. 

Harrison in Paris, 2022.

His final lesson to me was this: go live your life. Go live it and do the things you wish you would have. Because you have no idea when it will all end. When I die, whenever that may be, I don’t want people to say, “Cy sure wrote…marketing copy…well…” or whatever. (To be fair, I won’t really care what people will say. I’ll be dead.) Instead, I want them to say, “He lived the hell out of his life.” 

In the depths of one of my “what am I doing, this is so stupid” moments, Katy tried to calm me and said we might still be doing this even if Harrison was alive. I’m not certain that’s true. We would be settling into life as a family of four, with Katy practicing law and all of us learning how to wrangle each other every morning. We might be more tired than we often already are now. And all of that would be ok. All of that would be perfect. 

But it’s not perfect. And that’s exactly why we’re uprooting. Why I’m going to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. Why I’m writing this letter to you right now. 

We’re on a plane. We’re leaving for Paris. And we won’t be back for ten months. 

This whole big adventure is in some way inspired by Bill Buford and his book Dirt (and to a lesser degree, Heat). His experience was a lot different—moving to Lyon as a journalist of sorts, learning more about the history of French culture, living there almost accidentally for years and years, all to better understand what lay at the heart of the culinary tradition. If these newsletters won’t come often enough for you (I’m aiming for every two weeks, given we’re living life to the fullest), I recommend that book. In fact, as of this writing, there’s a copy of it in the Free Little Library outside our house. In a similar way to Buford, I expect this ten months will change my life. It will tie me to a place and people halfway across the world, and I will have lifelong connections to them. 

Selecting books might have been the hardest part of packing.

Make no mistake: I’m scared. We’re going to land in a foreign country and we do not have a return flight. This is not a vacation. This is life. This is an adventure, and it’s not meant to feel comfortable. But what frightens me most? I expect at some point during this trip—can it be called something as simple as a “trip”?—that Auggie will look at me inside our little apartment and say, “Want go home. Want go home.” And ask about his lawnmower, and vacuums, and giant Elmo pillow, and other niceties we had to leave behind because they simply won’t fit in the suitcases. Ask about his friends at school and his teachers and our neighbors who he used to see every day. My heart will break again. 

When all of this clouds my mind, I think of Harrison, climbing up on his Pikler Triangle, to the tippy top and squealing because of how high he was, how confident, how excited. Or clambering up onto an armchair by himself, and standing on the side of it looking out the window at the whole wide world. Or asking to go way up high and ride on my shoulders, barely hanging on, relying completely on me to hold him tight. I think of all this and wonder, as I often have, “What would Harrison do?” And I know the answer, and it ignites something inside me, something I’ve never really felt before. I know that “he’d be brave.” 

Because we’re on a plane. We’re leaving for Paris. And we won’t be back for ten months.