They were both retired schoolteachers. John had taught social studies for thirty-five years and Jeannie had taught economics for twenty-five years. (She had stopped teaching for a while to raise the children) but they really considered themselves travelers and had nurtured the dream since they were first married that upon retirement they would see the world together.

Their thirty-eight years of marriage had not been ideal but their life together could be judged average by world standards.

There was one time early on in the marriage when John had taken off for about six months. No one knew where he had disappeared to, and rumors circulated that he had taken up with another woman, a childhood sweetheart. The kids (they had two of them) were too young to remember and Jeannie was left on her own to cope with his infidelity.

During his absence she received an occasional phone call from him and they tried to reconcile their differences via long distance. When he did call he never revealed his location except to say that he was somewhere in the country. he swore to Jeannie that he was not seeing another woman and that he just needed time to put his head together, (to sort of sift things out of his mind) and he would eventually come back when he saw fit.

Six months later he came home looking refreshed and recovered and sported a nice tan.

"Where were you?" she asked after a prolonged silence and after he had settled in a bit.

"Oh, mostly down in California."

"Well, you got yourself a nice tan."

"Yeah, it gets hot out there," was his cryptic reply.

He never ventured to give more information and she never attempted to ask again. She was happy that he had sorted out in his head whatever it was that had been bothering him and he was happy to be home. But that was ten years ago.

Jeannie did not think he was much changed. If anything he was moodier than he had ever been and his sudden flares of temper were more than she could bear. He was terrible with the kids. Hardly what one would call a good father.

Over the years his mood swings became widely spaced from deep levels of depression to periods of high activity. In his "down" stage he would sit and stare and go through days, weeks and months of inertia. In such moods he even became suicidal. In his "up" stage he was uncontrollable with unchained energy and almost tireless activity, Many people have their ups and downs, but with John the swings were extreme and erratic.

Professional help was sought somewhere between the swings and the doctor suggested he take a series of tests. He was diagnosed as being a manic-depressive. He joked about it often and told everyone he was an M.D., the only doctor in the family and woefully underpaid. He was given doses of lithium for his condition which helped to control his mood swings. He took the medication faithfully and always signed his name John Rhodes, M.D.

Jeannie was also amused by his illness (as long as he took his lithium. She often told her friends that she had two husbands and she never knew which one was coming home that night, the manic or the depressed one. Even with his medication he had his mood swings but at least now he was more predictable.

If ever he was too upbeat Jeannie would panic and say, "Uh, Uh John. It's time to take your lithium." She usually said this in pretty much the same way a mother admonishes a child whose time it is to go to bed.

If John was an M. D. then Jeannie was the portrait of normality. She was so constant and predictable that she could only be described as stable. She was the one who held the family together and she was normal to the point of being a bore,(which she was not.) At best she was a survivor and keeping a low profile to John's bravura

was her way of holding things together.

During their early careers as teachers they had a dream that someday when the kids were grown-up, they would travel around the world on their retirement pensions and the little that they would have managed to save.

Their retirement came sooner than expected. The years passed quickly and were never dull but people do age and it becomes necessary to stop working. Some people hate to retire, others have no choice. But Jeannie and John had planned this moment since the early years of their marriage.

They decided to quit their jobs on the same day and went immediately to the liquor shop to buy a bottle of vintage French champagne. The returned home in an exceptionally cheerful mood, opened up a box of crackers and sliced wedges of Dutch cheese, popped the cork on the bottle and shouted, "Cheers! Here's to our retirement!"

John was ecstatic. Jeannie had never seen him so happy before and became worried. "John," she asked, "Did you take your lithium today?" John did not answer. He looked over at Jeannie with his usual smile of mischief and wondered why she never decided to become a nurse.

Three weeks of packing and farewells later they were ready to o. Their first trip was to be India. Although they were into their sixth decade, they had decided to travel on a shoestring and carry backpacks and wash n' wear clothes. They bought all the budget guide books and were going to stretch every dollar beyond its purchasing power. It wasn't that they couldn't afford a higher lifestyle. It was just that they chose to make this trip as long as possible. Their original plan was to travel

for three years.

Their first stop was to be New Delhi and their children bade them goodbye at the airport and promised to write faithfully via poste restante. They, in turn, promised they would call their children once a week from wherever they were. Neither kept their promises and gave all sorts of excuses why they had no time. They did get in touch from time to time and John once remarked, "No news is good news."

India was not their first trip abroad. The had been to the Caribbean once and spent their honeymoon in Mexico but Disneyland was really beneath hem and Las Vegas for all of its tacky glitz and gaudiness, as fine if only for a weekend, but this was their first trip to a country which both considered to be exotic.

They were not disappointed. They saw their snake charmers and fire-eaters, their cobras fighting the mongoose and met gurus and sadhus but were unable to distinguish one from the other. They saw the Taj Mahal and the Kajuraho carvings and the Ellora caves and a cremation along the Ganges.

"Jeannie, isn't this wonderful?"

"Yes, John. This is what we've always wanted."

"We've lived and worked through a lifetime for this!"

"It was certainly worth it!" then Jeannie became pensive and gently ordered, "John, don't forget to take your lithium."

There she was Jeannie the nurse distributing her daily supply of a miracle drug in much the same way a priest dispenses with an absolution.

After India it was Nepal and the Pokhara valley with its resident Tibetan refugees. In Kathmandu they met some neighbors from their home town. (It is a small world after all!) They caught dysentery from the local water and diarrhea from the local food. They fought off roaches in a flop house hotel highly recommended in their budget guidebook and described as "friendly and clean."

After they checked out John remarked to Jeannie, "When the guide books lie to you, then ho can you trust?"

They saw the living goddess, the Kumari, a young virgin no older than thirteen into whose body a goddess had chosen to inhabit until her first flow of blood.

"Jeannie, this is fantastic! Absolutely fantastic!"

"I'm glad you like it, John, but did you take your lithium today?"

"You're so concerned, Jeannie," John replied as he tossed his lithium pills into the street.

"This woman should have become a paramedic," he thought to himself.

A stray mongrel dog, scavenging for food gulped up the lithium pills which John had discarded. John noticed this and muttered half out loud, "That's gonna be one hell of a happy, well-adjusted dog."

The dog looked up at John and scurried happily away.

From Nepal they went ot Burma and spent a week in Pagan and Mandelay. Then into Bangkok and Chiang Mai. They made a trek into the hill country of northern Thailand where several tribes of ethnic diversity lived scattered in villages clustered across the mountains. As they were climbing up a gorge to gain access to an Akha village, Jeannie heard a voice shouting her name from behind.

"Jeannie, Jeannie.."

She turned around and saw Janice, a retired school teacher from a high school where Jeannie had worked years ago.

"Jeannie, what are you doing here in the middle of the jungles?" and not waiting to receive a reply she added, "What a pleasant surprise!" This close encounter of an unwanted kind robbed the Akha village of its exoticism and charm. The euphoria was further shattered by a group of Italians in the village singing Neopolitan canzone.

John and Jeannie then went on to China. They wanted to see the "Real China" just as they had been determined to see the "Real India", Burma and Nepal. They journeyed to see the magnificent terracotta warriors in Xian and bought a T-shirt at the Great Wall. They loved the food but hated the people. Actually, they really didn't hate the people. They merely tolerated their crude curiosity and xenophobic attitudes.

Almost every Chinaman whom they met who spoke a smattering of English asked them if they knew their cousin in San Francisco.

Jeannie and John asked for chopped suey in a Shanghai restaurant and were met with puzzled stares.

"Honey," said John, "You've got to give it its Chinese name or they won't understand you."

"I thought chopped suey was its Chinese name."

"Only in San Francisco. Here they call it something else."

They didn't remember what they did eat but it all tasted good. What Jeannie did remember was that it was the first time that John had called her "honey" since the days when he was courting her. It brought back memories of the times when she was too young to see his faults and not old enough to analyze his character.

Much of what they ate in China was unrecognizable.

"That's because they chop things up into small pieces," Jeannie observed.

"It all tastes the same to me, Jeannie."

"That's because you have a distinctly uneducated food palate."

This comment greatly annoyed John and he could feel his mood beginning to swing. He reached into his pocket and took one of his valium pills. He was ready to take a second one but decided to toss the bottle into the gutter. A chicken with a small brood of chicks passed by an plucked it from a crack in the gutter.

John saw this and whispered to himself, "Enjoy! Enjoy!"

"What's that, dear?" Jeannie asked.

"Oh, nothing!" John responded feeling slightly depressed thinking his wife was not only a frustrated nurse but an unsolicited food critic as well.

Their children wired money from home and it arrived at two week intervals.

Since they didn't want the trip to end, Jeannie and John portioned every cent, won, yuan, ruble and Hong Kong dollar they got their hands on.

They slept in budget hotels and dined on fast foods. They walked a mile rather than splurge on a cab, traveled economy class and washed their clothes with their own hands rather than send them to a hand laundry.

Jeannie noticed that John would sometimes feel down and the distance between his moods increased rapidly and took on greater swing.

"Darling, did you take your valium today?"

"Yes, dear," he responded disinterestedly but Jeannie was no longer aware of which John was answering her.

The excitement of travel became the impetus for keeping them together. They were now locked into a routine and needed each other's support. Each day was an adventure unto itself until three years and twenty countries later it all came crashing to an end.

When they finally reached home their children were there to greet them at the airport. John and Jeannie looked ten years younger but their children had aged terribly, when they told friends about their three year odyssey they were me with indifference.

When John told his story of how he was rushed to the hospital in Thailand after having been bitten by a stray dog, everyone gasped and showed a keen interest.

"No, John. It wasn't Thailand. It was Malaysia where you were bitten."

"Are you sure, Jeannie?"

"Of course, I'm sure. You were bitten in Malaysia and it wasn't a dog bite. A mean cat scratched you. In Thailand you had a bad case of diarrhea."

After that confrontation and correction John needed a shot of lithium. He admitted that his memory was not as good as hers but why did she always find it necessary to correct him in front of friends? She even remembered the menus of restaurants in Madras and the addresses of Embassies around the world but her accuracy was beginning to eat away at him, but all he could say was, "I guess you're right. You always had a better memory for things like that."

John also had a keen mind but it was for other things. What he did remember of the trip were historical dates and conquests of armies and generals trying to leave their imprint on history. During the trip he took copious notes while Jeannie the nurse turned economist, kept a record of their finances and managed the budget.

As the excitement of the world travel ebbed into memory, the greater reality of living with each other every day in retirement began to set in.

They decided to buy a hope. Jeannie wanted to live in the city near her children and grandchildren. John wanted no part of it. He preferred isolation in the backwoods of Minnesota. They compromised. They would spend their next five years in the backwoods and then move into Madison, Wisconsin to be closer to the kids when both grew older and in need of their children to care for them.

So they bought a house in the woods. The nearest town was a place called Sheltered waters. It was a community of about four hundred families most of whom were intermarried with each other. Everybody was everybody's cousin and most shared a common surname of which there were no more than thirty or so in the whole town.

There was one of most everything in the town; one coffee shop, one baker, a post office, one grocery store but no movie theater. John and Jeannie bought a home about twenty miles out of town. It was a nice place, all on one level with a swimming pool in the back yard and the nearest neighbor lived about half a mile down the road.

Jeannie spent most of her time in the garden and John sorted out and catalogued the five thousand or so pictures he had taken on their worldwide tour. Occasionally he consulted with Jeannie about the exact details of some of the places because she had a better memory for details.

"Honey, this looks like Bombay."

"No, dear," she would say with assurance. "It's Bangalore. Don't you remember that restaurant in the corner of the picture. They served a marvelous curry."

"O.K. then it's Bangalore," John conceded.

Five minutes later pointing to a picture which lay on the table near a cup of coffee he asked her, "Was this photo taken in Surabaya or Semarang?"

She heaved a sigh and responded coldly, "Does it really make much difference, dear?"

He loved these answers. They completely neutralized and fond memories he had of their three years of travel and the sole dream which had held their marriage together. John sensed that her condescension lay in his desire to live far apart from their children. neither was completely happy with life in Sheltered waters and both were slowly getting tired of each other.

The surrounding woods around the house were teeming with birds and wildlife and John enjoyed spending afternoons shooting pictures of the birds hidden within the foliage. He never abandoned his love for photography. Jeannie often joked by saying, "Someday you're going to be shooting with guns instead of cameras."

They rarely received visitors. Their own children found the trip out to Sheltered

Waters too difficult to manage especially with the children being so restless and the weekend traffic being what it was. Sheltered Waters was so remote that it might have very well been called Secluded Waters. The watered in the name were probably the large lake which lay right near the town. The lake was about two kilometers across and five kilometers long and was home to fish, frog and migratory birds.

John also liked to spend most of his time near the lake. He was never much of a fisherman but he did enjoy rowing out to the middle of the lake and staring at the mirror smooth surface with the reflections of nature and the world. He would sit and stare for hours, his eyes piercing deep into the surface and down to the bottom of the water's depths.

Jeannie was concerned about these visits to the lake and reminded him to take his lithium, that mood-controlling drug which predisposed an otherwise violent man to be normal. They sat together one day and decided to invite all of the friends they had met on their world odyssey to come visit Sheltered Waters. They must have sent out over two hundred letters to close to twenty countries.

"Please, come to visit us. You'll love it out here. We've got plenty of room and a swimming pool. The woods around the house are filled with all kinds of deer, fox and rabbits and the lake near the town is a fisherman's paradise."

They signed their names to this form letter, sealed, stamped and mailed all two hundred of them and waited patiently for a response. The letters were sent to people whom they had met in passing. They were strangers on trips which had easily become friends and who had opened up their homes to them for a night. They were friends in the extended meaning of the word, but not close by any means.

John and Jeannie were more than eager to repay the kindness of years past but most of these friends were not ready to pack a suitcase to take off to the dubious charms and pleasures of Sheltered Waters.

They got back polite responses to more than half of their invitations. All were cordial and filled with promises to drop by at the earliest convenience.

"If our children will not come to visit us, why should our friends?" Jeannie mused philosophically and then began to wonder why she ever consented to live in this god-forsaken paradise. She was always the more compromising of the two in the relationship and worked harder to keep it together in spite of her condescending attitude. John would have been perfectly happy to live by himself. With his vast catalog of interests he really didn't need anyone.

She always admitted that she was a bit of a nag, but she nagged him for his own good. After all, if he stopped taking his lithium God only knows what would happen or what he would turn into. God, the man could become a real monster!

It was a month later when the first frost of winter set in that John and Jeannie did, in fact, receive their first visitor. It happened one night when they had both gone to sleep. They heard a scratching and a scurrying in the rafters of the house between the ceiling and the floor of the attic above.

"Dear, I think we finally have a visitor."

"Is it one of the ones we invited?" John said between his snores.

"I think…I think it's an animal."

"Then it must be one of our friends."

"John, this is no time for joking," Jeannie insisted.

"Don't worry, Jeannie. He's probably trying to escape from the cold. He won't bother us. Go back to sleep."

"But, John, he's gnawing away at the house. Others will follow."

John was annoyed every time Jeannie interrupted his sleep.

"O.K., I'll take care of it in the morning."

That ended the conversation and John indeed took care of the situation. He bought a gun. It was a rifle. He had hunted in his younger days but only for sport. In those days he hunted for duck and geese. Now he was after larger game.

"Dear, why did you buy a rifle? All we needed was some rat poison and some bait and to seal up the house so these creatures can't get in. You're not going to shoot that rifle in the house, are you?"

She said this jokingly but John did not answer. He loaded the cartridge and examined the barrel.

"John, I think we should get some rat poison or something. It will be better than a gun. Guns are dangerous."

"How do we know it's a rat?" John said in a voice bereft of feeling or emotion.

The next day John went into town and came back with a second gun. This was a smaller one which could easily be held in one hand, When Jeannie asked him why he bought a second gun, he mentioned that a smaller gun was more practical and easier to shoot to kill something in the house that was a nuisance.

"Besides," he added, "Maybe it's not a rat but only a mouse."

The animal returned every night for a week and Jeannie was up most of the night fearful that the animal would break into the room from above the rafters. She imagined that it was some field or forest rat. What other animal could it be? Foxes live in dens and rabbits live in holes in the ground and a mouse could never generate such a deafening sound. Besides she could determine by the movement above that there were now more than one. Probably several.

"John, tomorrow I'm going into town to get some rat poison. The noise is driving me crazy."

What she really wanted to say was that she hated rats. She always did ever since she was a child. The mere thought of a rat living in their retirement home filled her with disgust.

"John?"

John said nothing. He turned over to one side and fell easily asleep.

The next morning after breakfast Jeannie dressed warmly and took the keys to the car and hurried into town, a twenty-minute drive. John was still in bed when he heard her leave. He got up and struggled to keep awake. Putting on his slippers he moved to go into the bathroom where his daily supply of lithium lay in convenient tamper-proof bottles. He took the bottles, all of them, and emptied the contents into the toilet. Then with a flick of his wrist he flushed them to eternity while baptizing them with the relief of his bladder.

"That's that!" he said to no one in particular but especially to himself. "I hated those things, those happy pills which kept me from being myself."

Years of taking these mood-controlling pills had neutralized his true nature and to what avail? To be nagged incessantly in his retirement over a harmless field rat or squirrel.

He took the rifle off the wall and loaded the cartridge with new bullets purchased the day before. He moved into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee, black with no sugar. Taking the rifle and coffee he crossed over into the living room and sat facing the door waiting for Jeannie to return with the box of rat poison.

A car approached the driveway. The ignition was turned off and footsteps were heard approaching the door. John clicked the trigger and waited patiently for the door to open.

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