My Cardboard Balcony

Dearly Departed Traveler by Belinda Roddie "I'm flying to Madrid and canoeing to Greece," he told me over tea in the cramped café built the middle of a sunset. He wasn't kidding, either, and they found him half-submerged in salty debris and driftwood off the island of Crete. There were waterlogged laurels in his curly hair. Two weeks later, his sister bought a motorcycle and rode all the way from Boston to San Francisco to meet me and spread his ashes in the Pacific. "Not what he would've wanted," she told me, "but I'm not renting a helicopter to hover over the Mediterranean Sea." We exchanged numbers that day. We had sex for the first time four months later. When I woke up for the first time in a new place, I thought about packing just one bag and camping out in Alaska like Chris McCandless did, but with less dying involved. Then I saw her curled up in the sheets beside me, slightly droo

As soon as I turned the music on, instantly Joseph started dancing. His hip gyrations for enough for our great-aunt Esther to "get the vapors," fanning herself and hiccuping as she attempted to finish off a sip of champagne. Her much younger husband Cameron, however, seemed entertained by the display, and he, too, got up and began to shake his pelvis around, much to the amusement, and horror, of our relatives.