LIVING THE DREAM

One night my husband, Victor, turned to me in bed and said, “Sweetie, I think I need to do something different.”

I threw my book onto the nightstand. “You know you could teach anywhere,” I said, clutching at what I thought could be a turning point, a crossroads, a pivotal moment. Victor had been teaching middle school for over 15 years. He was the most passionate and principled teacher I knew. I pushed the covers off and sat up. “When we first met, you said that someday you wanted to go teach in another country, remember? Why not do it now?”

Now, because I had just spent two years writing what I thought was my best novel yet, only to have it rejected by 10 publishers. My agent suggested I let it sit in a drawer for a while and go start a new novel. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if I wrote my new better book in some exotic locale, perhaps somewhere with an ocean view?

“You’re totally in a place with teaching where you can try something out of your comfort zone; something that could make a real difference.”

“You’re right. I am. Let’s try to figure out how we can do that,” he said, giving me a hurried kiss.

The promise of paradise fell into my family’s lap on an afternoon in early spring. I was languidly swinging back and forth on the front porch of our blue house on the hill in Nevada City, California, when the mailman drove his truck up the long steep driveway, handed me my mail, and shot back down to his truck. I opened the latest issue of my college alumni magazine. I skimmed around the classes from the 1980s and saw that someone named Mark consulted with Fortune 500 companies on corporate social responsibility. Stephen was practicing acupuncture in San Raphael, while Professor Hannah taught geography at Oregon State University. Scott and Kristen had just welcomed their fourth child, and Brad and his family had just moved to Bali to help start a brand-new Kindergarten through to 12th-grade school.

Bali.

I said it