The Back Pack: MacGuffins
In The Wax Pack, my MacGuffin was clear: that pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards.
For The Six Pack, it was a bit more abstract, but the wrestlers who performed on the December 26, 1983 show when the Iron Sheik became WWF Champion were my quarry.
In both cases, I began the journey by putting literal representations of these MacGuffins on the dashboard of my car: the pack of cards on my 2002 Honda Accord, and my childhood Iron Sheik action figure on my 2012 Ford Fusion.
This time around, I've hit the road not to write a book, but to live a life. I have no idea how long I'll be an itinerant, only that it feels like the right time in my life to have the return address part of the envelope left blank. Without a clear MacGuffin, I taped a drawing my eight-year-old niece Olivia made for me to the dash (see above).
During my goodbye dinner with my sister and her kids, Olivia presented me with this illustration, which she described as a portrait of me sitting in a chair (probably reading) on an island (my lifelong passion), surrounded by ferns (my favorite plants, and not just because they start with "F"). She also gave me a write-up of facts about ferns she had researched on the internet (first transcribing using pen-and-paper, then typing into a digital note), including such nuggets as "ferns first appeared on earth more than 360 million years ago." In one simple picture and only in the second grade, Olivia had captured my entire essence. Her thoughtfulness formed a lump in my throat.
Guided by Olivia's hand, I have begun the first leg my journey, in search of stories and visiting libraries and bookstores to chat up my new book. Right now I'm in Surprise, Arizona, an outpost in the northwest corner of the Phoenix metropolitan area. The muted pinks and browns of the desert are ubiquitous here in the Valley of the Sun, a vast maze of drive-in churches and credit unions with the stamp of optimized city planning. Unlike dense, old cities like New York or Boston, whose concrete obscures any sense of their erstwhile natural habitat, the Phoenix area is like the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, a work-in-progress, the frames of new development pushing further and further towards the ring of mountains in the distance. You get the constant sense that none of this belongs here, that the cottontail rabbits hopping around my Airbnb are in a perpetual state of confusion over why they're sharing territory with garden gnomes and ceramic frogs from Pier 1.
What's your MacGuffin in your life right now?
