Embarrassment of Mangoes A Caribbean Interlude

The Five-Year Plan "Your courage is like a kite. Big wind raises it higher." --From my fortune cookie, Toronto, Canada; November 1996 "Relinquishing fears now allows you to succeed." --From my fortune cookie, Port of Spain, Trinidad; November 1998 Perhaps the hardest thing, we realized in hindsight, was making the decision to go. It had started as idle, dreamy chat in the bleak days of January and February, the time of year I detest in Toronto, when all the color is sucked out of the city, and even the snow looks gray and tired. As I do. I left for work in the dark and returned home in the dark. On the rare days the sun bothered to show itself, it was a pale lemon pretender, offering little warmth and barely brightening the gunmetal surface of Lake Ontario. When I cooked dinner in the evening, Steve would catch me warming my hands over the stove, and, later, huddling over the heating vent in our bedroom while I read. It's a very sad sight, he would say. I looked like the little match girl rather than a successful magazine editor. I didn't care. I longed to be too hot. Steve--three years younger than me, all hard angles and sharp edges on the outside, a romantic softie within--was my partner in work as well as life. A small-town Ontario boy, he'd relocated to the city to go to art college in the seventies and never left. For the past few years, we'd been working for the same magazine, and it was hard to tell most days where business ended and private life began. We operated in separate spaces: he, the freelance art director, from a crammed studio tucked into the back of the second floor of our house; me, the editor, at the magazine's main office, a fifteen-minute drive away. But we speed-dialed each other incessantly and flung e-mails and electronic story layouts back and forth all day long. When people asked how our relationship could survive our working together, I'd exclaim about the virtues. "How many people have a chance to see firsthand how really good their spouses are at what they do?" That was on the good days. The rest of the time, I drove home in the cold at night, freezing and fuming, replaying the day, and arrived ready to rant: about the sloppy writers, the uninspired stories, the cheapskate publisher, the blown deadlines and, especially, the talented but unreasonable art director. "Turn it off, the office is closed," Steve would say. And I would--for at least a full minute. Our work and our personal lives were inseparable. And there never seemed to be enough hours for both. Every day required a battle plan. Besides the magazine, we squeezed in other publishing projects that we worked on together--including a small ongoing series of guidebooks for boaters on the Great Lakes that Steve published himself. They took a backseat to the other stuff and were, like their publisher, often late. Meanwhile, I was ruled day and night by my watch and the to-do lists in my Day-Timer. "I can barely brush my teeth without a deadline," I joked to friends. But increasingly I didn't find it funny. On the surface, Steve remained calm and unruffled, letting the pressure swirl around him, seemingly as casual about business deadlines as he was about his standard business attire (T-shirt and jeans no matter what, unless the weather permitted shorts or required a sweatshirt). "It will all get done," he'd tell me, "whether you stew about it or not." Yet I knew he was growing more and more resentful of the constant demands on his time and his perpetual state of overcommitment. Not to mention what he swore was "ten months of winter a year." His solution was thrown out casually--just another sensible suggestion, like telling me I should crank up the thermostat when I complained about the cold. "So let's take a break and sail south to the Caribbean for a couple of years," he said.Vanderhoof, Ann is the author of 'Embarrassment of Mangoes A Caribbean Interlude', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767914024 and ISBN 0767914023.