Plan B

Life trumps art, or at least the humbler attempts at it. The symmetry of reversing my grandfather’s original immigrant voyage, Antwerp to Philadelphia, has been irreparably altered. Efforts to place me with different lines, on the Rio Madeira and the Independent Accord, have failed. I’ve been told that it’s nothing personal; one captain declined to take winter passengers, the other, to commit on short notice. All very well. The plan now is to fly to Kraków—by Zeppelin! (Just kidding.) I’ll be there Friday evening; complication resolved, theoretically. In June then, I’ll attempt to replicate Aleks’s passage instead of reversing it, which could very much affect the aesthetics of this account—and of my life, who knows? But both art and life are a series of improvisations, unless you are a great artist or a great soul, who bends the world to his will.Or her.