History and Credit History
4 September 2016, 4:04 p.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
When I say there are debts and there are debts, I mean there are all kinds of debts. Financial debts, emotional debts, intellectual debts, imaginative debts. Debts of memory and debts of obligation.
After a couple of years of working full time I had paid off my student loans, and began to enjoy the life of a single professional with a good solid salary—not as good as DBAs in the private sector, but way better than what most Ph.D.s in medieval history make. I spent a lot of money on fancy bicycles, and during one period—when I was on the night shift, tending to that touchy server—I ran up some pretty sizable bar tabs. I wasn’t saving as much as I should have, but I had no debt, not even a car payment. When the touchy server became stable enough that I could leave it alone at night, I went back on the day shift. I started dating one of the librarians, and after a few years we got married.
We decided not to have kids—I say “we decided,” but now when I look back at those long conversations, it’s obvious that she was agonizing over something, and I was just playing the agreeable male, taking the path of least resistance to bed. We bought an old house near downtown Waukegan and started fixing it up. It was a big project, an endless project really. We made sure that parts of the house were always suitable for entertaining, but of course there was always at least one room under construction, a source for amusing stories of what we had found in the walls. We really loved that house.
When a new book on medieval history appeared on the shelves of the library, I would always read it, and once in a while, as I closed the cover, I would feel the urge to go a little deeper, to do some real research, to encounter that distant world on its own terms. But I knew darn well that I wasn’t in a position to do so. From time to time I tried to play some of the computer games set in the Middle Ages, but there was something about the games, or about me, that just failed to engage. It wasn’t that I knew too much about the era: from what I could tell, my expertise—what was left of it—couldn’t begin to compare with the knowledge of some of the people who designed the games. Eventually I realized that my sense of boredom came from the mental habits of my day job: for me, the database structure of the game was all too visible. I couldn’t become immersed in the life of a bygone society because I was too busy figuring out how they had weighted the scoring system.
I did enjoy some of the historical fiction set in that era. Not the kind with elves and monsters, but the realistic stuff, where the author did his or her best to help us imagine the lives of ordinary people in almost impossibly distant times—usually, by putting those people into the plot of a murder mystery. For a while, I read those fictions critically, with a notebook at hand where I kept two lists: things the author felt free to make up, and things the author felt obligated to base on fact. I suppose I was trying to find the boundary where research ended and imagination took over. There was an implicit judgment in my lists: I liked the books where the author took historical fact as far as it could go, and only used imagination to fill in the private details of an otherwise unknowable human life. Maybe for a while I had ambitions for those lists, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with them (now, in 2016, smart kids publish lists like that on Buzzfeed). And after a while… well, I had found the authors I liked, and now I read them just for pleasure. Uncritically. Instead of a notebook on the side table, there was a glass of wine.
I had become a hobbyist, a history buff, an amateur with high standards, but still very much an amateur.
One day my wife announced that she had fallen in love with another woman, and the divorce period of my life began.
Yeah, there are debts and there are debts. Some debts we just talk about, as a way of expressing thanks or acknowledging influence. And there are other debts that we damn well better pay back, because if we don’t, there will be consequences.
The divorce was just about as amicable as a divorce can be, but there were some financial rough spots. Apparently “we decided” that I would be the one to negotiate with the contractors about our changes of plans; later, I couldn’t remember that conversation, but my soon-to-be-ex-wife insisted that I had nodded my head to everything she said, which sounded exactly like my behavior in almost all our conversations that year. So I assumed responsibility for a $7,000 bill from the plumber for work we didn’t need, and then there were problems with mail forwarding, and a couple of missed payments on the electric bill, not to mention the parking tickets and the towing charges and the blown head gasket on the car whose warranty I had voided by not taking it in for scheduled maintenance a month earlier; anyway I ended up living in a studio apartment with about $11,000 in debt spread between my old credit card, the one I’d had forever, and the four new ones, the ones that began appearing in my mailbox as soon I started to carry my balance forward from month to month. My once-stellar credit rating took a dive, but it wasn’t that bad: even at the post-divorce nadir of my credit, I could have bought a new car, if I had wanted to pay a couple of extra points on the loan.
We still spent our weekends together, fixing up the old house, but less idiosyncratically now, because we had our eyes on the real-estate market. We managed to sell the house in September 2005, at the peak of the housing bubble. Now the prices of old houses in downtown Waukegan weren’t nearly as inflated as those of condos in the western part of Lake County, let alone Scottsdale, Arizona, so even by selling at the market high we didn’t get back everything we had put into the old place. I guess I figured, okay, well, that’s life. The house was our surrogate baby, after all.
And on the whole, we were incredibly lucky to get the price we got. With the cash from the sale, I was able to pay off all the credit cards, and put some money in the bank. I bought a new car with a 3-year guaranteed low interest rate from the manufacturer, just to start making some regular payments, in order to build my credit rating back up again. When I joined my ex-wife and her partner in Grant Park to celebrate Obama’s election in 2008, I had an extra reason to celebrate: my FICO score had just reached 803, the highest it had been in five years.
But even though my personal finances were in good shape, the economy of the world was falling apart. In particular, the municipal revenues of the city of Waukegan were dropping precipitously. In early 2009 the Library administration informed us that all salaried employees would be required to take a two-week unpaid furlough. Like everyone else, I grumbled. But when I went home and looked at my bank account, and at the calendar, I realized that I had been given an opportunity.
My ex-wife was already in Europe, in Cologne, with her partner, a photographer who was traveling on a fellowship that was somehow still being disbursed. I managed to get hold of them by Skype—just an audio call on a laptop, in those primitive days—and pitched them my idea. To my surprise they were interested, very interested. They said they’d join me, and they’d even help with the cost of the rental car. So I spent hours on the Internet, searching for a rental car deal that would let me pick up a vehicle in Mannheim, Germany and return it in Bologna, Italy, with the endpoints of the journey proper being two smaller locales near those airports: Speyer and Canossa.
It took a while, but I found a good deal, and reserved a minivan, a model I’d never heard of before, an Opel Zafira. There would be room for me, my ex-wife, her partner, and their friends—three women they’d met in France. My colleague, the system administrator, thought it was really weird that I would go on vacation with my ex-wife and her partner and their presumably lesbian friends. In a mock intervention, he demanded that I confess to wanting a three-way. Or a four-way.
“It’s not like that,” I said, “it’s the humor, we still get along.”
“So it’s the badinage,” he said, making the word sound really kinky, like some sort of bondage. A lot of us at the library were refugees from the humanities, with bigger vocabularies than we knew what to do with.
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s the badinage. The banter. We still make each other laugh. Sometimes.”
But then, two weeks before my furlough was scheduled to begin, I got an email from my ex-wife. She and her partner and their French friends had decided to do the Camino de Santiago instead. That is, instead of riding in a minivan from Speyer to Canossa, they were going to do a real hike, an actual walk on foot, from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. My ex-wife wished me well.
I was disappointed, of course, but then I went back and added up the numbers, and I realized that I could afford the trip by myself, if I was careful with money. I had found a great price on the minivan rental, so I didn’t want to cancel the reservation, but it was way too big of a vehicle for just me. I started looking around the internet, to see if anyone needed a ride between Mannheim and Bologna. I went to travel sites, medieval history sites, digital hitchhiking sites—you know, the new sharing economy. Well, I found an open-source project with some innovative technology that was looking for volunteer beta testers. And they had some passengers for me.
Boy, did they have some passengers for me.
Now, in my professional life, I avoid beta technology like, well, like a medieval plague. But I told myself: I’m not going to Europe as a hard-ass database administrator. I’m going as a history buff. And this was my chance to do the Walk to Canossa the way I really wanted to do it, the way I had always wanted to do it, since that day in undergrad when I first traced the route on a paper map.
It’s the map I have beside me now, here in this coffee shop in Zion, Illinois, the map I kept in the glove compartment of the minivan on my journey in 2009, the map that I opened on the Col de Mont Cenis to show the Rabbit Warriors, when none of us could connect to the internet, as we argued about whether this mountain pass was the same mountain pass Hannibal had crossed, when he traversed the Alps with his elephants. It’s from the 1980s, this map, a tourist map for backpackers of what was then contemporary Europe, pre-EU Europe, late-Cold War Europe, a huge map that folded down into the size of a paperback book. In other words, it was a very aspirational map for me, a guy who didn’t own a serious backpack, and had never set foot in Europe. A guy who wouldn’t make the journey for another 26 years.
I carried that map from study carrel to study carrel in the university library, and as I read the history of the Middle Ages I would draw on that map, with a mechanical pencil, my own personal overlay of the medieval world.
The pencil marks are still there, the light graphite traces of my scholarly ambitions: old boundaries, old place names, old routes: Speyer to Bisanz. Bisanz to Gex. Gex to Mont Cenis. Mont Cenis to Savoy. Savoy to Canossa.
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