Former World-Traveling Trules Home Alone for the Holidays

Belated Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas!

Just a few hours after the publishing of this post, I’ll be dropping off Surya and Exsel, my Indonesian-born wife and son, in Albuquerque, for the two-day flight back to Medan, Sumatra, to visit their Batak tribe and Protestant-observing birth family, for their first Christmas “back home” in many many moons, Surya’s first in twenty-two years, Exsel’s in eight.

They’ll be gone 3 weeks - leaving their Pak Trules “home alone” for Christmas. (Most of you already know that “Pak”, silent “k”, is a term of respect and endearment in Indonesian for a beloved elder.) Anyway, that’s me, old Pak Trules, the former foot-loose and fancy-free world traveler, “home alone” for Christmas and New Years.

Hell, I was supposed to make the same trip across the Pacific to the vast Asiatic continent - to Manila, capital of the Philippines, to visit my oldest childhood friend from first grade, Ric Reaper, and his Filipina wife, for the same three weeks, but… life had other plans for all three of us. Mostly sad and inconvenient health ones for Beata, the Reaper’s wife, who had a double health whammy, whose specifics I’d rather not announce here, but whose consequences were severe enough to keep the Reapers home in New York on the Upper East Side, and yours Trulesly back here near the Rodeo in Santa Fe… “home alone” for the holidays. How many times have I said it already? Poooooor me!

Don’t feel too bad for me though. That’s makeup, not a real black eye. Never trust a complaining Trules!

But I remember the days… the months… the years… when I was a globetrotting gadfly… visiting almost 100 countries all over our beautiful and lonely planet… almost every summer, winter, and sometimes even on “spring break” - with my lucky USC academic schedule, when I could just pack up and go, sublet my rented house in Echo Park, and use my annual tax return for the flight. I was the frugal and “savvy traveler”, even having recorded a few episodes for THE “Savvy Traveler” itself, PBS’ flagship travel radio broadcast, years there were even “podcasts”.

Perhaps that’s what led me to creating my own travel podcast in 2016, “e-travels with e. trules”, when the PBS radio show went belly up, and one of my former USC students came to a live reading of travel tales I told in LA and said,

I always loved reading your travel stories online, Trules, but they’re so much better hearing you tell them live in your own voice! You should do a podcast.

Of course, back in 2016, I naturally said,

What’s that?

But soon, being a naturally curious artiste, after seeking out the essential help of podcast producer Harry Duran, sound designer, Alysha Bermudez, and music composer, Amanda Yamate, I surprisingly had (for a few weeks) the #1 rated travel podcast on i-Tunes.

Here’s the link for the Welcome Episode, and the link for the first Episode, “Grazing with Camels”, about a camel safari I took overnight for 3 days into the Biblical Sinai Desert of Moses - with desert-dwelling Bedouins - living without any connection to the modern world whatsoever. It was both spectacular and eye-opening.

I know that many of you on my list have listened to, or read, my travel adventures before, but I also know that others of you new Santa Fe Substackers haven’t - so please allow me this opportunity to introduce you to Trules, the former world traveler!

Then again, I’ve been writing electronic travel tales from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Sinai since 1999, and from small internet “coffee shops” in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and all over Southeast Asia, almost from the birth of the internet in Asia in 2000. Until 2002, when on a Fulbright grant in northeast Borneo, another childhood friend who had once turned me on to Crosby, Stills, & Nash, The Doors, and Tim Buckley (Who’s that? Look him up!), but who now called herself “Rebopper”, volunteered to create a travel “website” for me, to which I responded in typical Trulesian fashion,

What’s that, Jeanie… I mean, Rebopper?

Don’t worry. Just send me all your stories and photos. I absolutely love them. I’ll do everything else. What do you want to call it?

And that’s how “e-travels with e. trules” was born - the website - still online- with hundreds of travel stories.

Here’s a link to the oldest one chronologically, occurring in 1967, when I was still 19 years old, a sophomore in college, when I naively trekked into the dangerous bowels of New Yawk’s Lower Eastside to “Slug’s in the Far East” (the notorious avant-garde jazz club in “Alphabet City”), got mugged, but nevertheless ended up sitting on a bar stool directly next to Miles Davis, the trumpet genius and Prince of Darkness, so crushed and surrounded by his sycophants that I couldn’t breathe or squirm out from being well over my star-struck adolescent head.

And here’s the most recent one, “Confessions of An Aging Traveler”, from April 2022, when I traveled back to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with my Indonesian family 25 years after I’d been there in 1997 with my 19-year-old Chicano mentee, Alejandro, from Pico-Union in Los Angeles, having driven the entire 1500 mile length of Mexico in my white Toyota Celica convertible. Ay Caramba! This time, however, with The Fam, I’m not so nimble… as I trip, climbing up the airport shuttle, and miss the plane connection in Mexico City altogether. Adios mio!

But ever since 2015… when Exsel first arrived in America…. it having taken six years to get him a green card and permanent residency (which we were damn lucky to get), during which time I left the country only once to teach a theater workshop in Moscow, and having left the U.S. only once since his permanent residency as a family, as I say above, in 2022, I haven’t exactly been the juggernauting international citizen that I used to be. In fact, I’ve basically been one sedentary housebound sonofagun (except, of course, for the permanent move from LA to Santa Fe in September 2022).

No complaints about this, however.

(Happy face!)

But back to The Holidays.

Here are a couple of photos of some Indonesian-American Christmases past.

While this year… off the two Bataks go… back to the Sumatran rain forest from which they hail. Well actually, back to Medan, the biggest city on the largest island of 17,000 islands in the archipelago of Indonesia, the 4th most populous nation on earth. Back to “the former Paris of Indonesia”, now rather a run-down, dirty, and polluted third-world city, run by a backward and corrupt Islamic government and political system that discriminate against anything that isn’t Muslim, whether it be prayer, school, dress, food, culture, or anything else that my wife was so eager to run away from… but to which she sacrificed the physical closeness to her family (even though she still FaceTimes them 3-4 times a week).

Off they go…..

Santa Surya (Ho! Ho! Ho!) has packed two green plastic Christmas trees to assemble on-site with all the trimmings, one for her own room on the property she’s converted into a rooming house, and one for her sister’s house which she helped her buy. She’ll be spending precious time with her aging Mom and with both her sister and brother and their homes full of children. Exsel is looking forward to hanging out with his two brothers, Felix, two years his elder, now 18, and Frenlin, two years younger than him, now 14. Even with just his smattering of Indonesian, which he’s been studying daily on Duolingo, the language app, he still has a great bond with both of them. He bought Felix a pair of trendy new Nikes, and Frenlin two gigantic containers of muscle-building protein powder on Amazon. With his own hard-earned money!

If I went, I’d definitely be a fifth wheel… or maybe a 10th one. None of the family can speak English, so all they do is smile awkwardly at me. And me at them. I feel like an idiot. Surya and Exsel are too busy to translate, and I always just wish I could “go home”, which obviously, I can’t - since I’m literally on the other side of the planet.

I remember one New Year’s Eve I spent in Bali- with the Indonesian Medan tribe. It was “Hell in the Tropics.” Not ever to be repeated. So… you may think that I’m a lousy family member, but what can I say?

“We have worked it out”. You know, The Beatles kinda thing.

Leaving me…

“Home alone for the Holidays.”

I know, I know, maybe not SO bad!

But…

In any case….

I was thinkin’…

…of gettin’ me…

…a Big Fat Santa Suit…

…with around 300 pounds of cotton puff-puff stuffing….

…and flying in my Santa Sleigh…

with All the Reindeer…

…from the North Pole….

All the way….

…to the Santa Fe Central Plaza

(built in 1609)

…and when I landed….

….on the stroke of midnight

…on Christmas Eve…

…that I would…

…hand out gifts…

…to all the wayward…

…and homeless…

tramps and drifters and vagabonds and other beggars without a banquet

and without a family,

whether they were far away in Indonesia

or actually

non-existent

and nowhere at all

but I’d just wish all these Nowhere People Home Alone for Christmas in the Middle of the Santa Fe Plaza

a Very Merry Christmas,

from

also Home Alone

Ol’ (Ho! Ho! Ho!)

Santa Trules

Whatayathink?

I know, I know… some of you think…

…it’s just a bunch of sentimental fantastical rubbish.

A sleighful of self-indulgent narcissistic gibberish!

Welllll….

Bah Humbug to YOU!

BUT

TO THE REST OF YA,

MERRY CHRISTMAS, GOOD HEALTH, GOOD CHEER, A LATE HAPPY CHANUKAH, AND AN UPCOMING HAPPY NEW NEW YEAR!!!

OR…

WHATEVER ELSE YOU CELEBRATE!!!!

XOXO

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Thanks so much!!!

Santa Trules

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