He sometimes said his greatest regret was not taking the old Trans-Siberian Railway eastward to Lake Baikal.
Not because he cared much for bucket lists. He considered such catalogs as vanity with stationery, for those who had wasted decades suddenly writing down ten expensive ways to continue wasting time. No, what he regretted was more precise than that.
He regretted never sitting in a dim canteen somewhere near Irkutsk while some broad-faced stranger lied to him magnificently over soup and vodka. He regretted never hearing the room laugh at a joke he only half understood. He regretted missing stories that would now likely never be told the same way again.
His body had long since vetoed such ambitions.
These days he was lucky if the month’s arithmetic ended with enough left over for prescriptions. If Melinda French Gates wished to finance a crippled Pennsylvanian’s global adventures, he remained open to discussion, but until then, conversations near Lake Baikal would have to survive inside his skull.
He had learned not to underestimate the mind as a vehicle.
That was why a sixty-year-old man in western Pennsylvania spent evenings studying Bulgarian language verbs and watching odd travel vlogs filmed by people with poor microphones wandering through villages no algorithm loved. Some people mistook this for eccentricity. It was practicality. If the body could not go, imagination would.
He was fortunate in another respect. He had friends in Bulgaria. Real friends. Not the internet sort who sent emojis and vanished.
Through them he had come to know several different Bulgarias.
There were proud people in their thirties who had never once considered living elsewhere. A forty-year-old who had gone to Germany because patriotism did not pay the electric bill. Parents - his own age - preserving songs older than most nations. Teenage boys who, by the mere act of being decent and curious, occasionally restored his faith in the future. A nail technician in Plovdiv who had to smile politely at tourists while privately considering homicide.
This was better than travel videos. It was a country as seen from its kitchen windows.
He distrusted countries marketed through cinema. America had been selling itself that way his entire life. Freedom, convertibles, swimming pools, rich teeth, and endless highways. Foreigners then asked the wrong questions with admirable confidence.
When he first toured the United Kingdom in 2002, people had repeatedly asked him two things.
How many guns do you own?
Do you drive a Cadillac?
Not whether he owned a gun. That much was assumed. Quantity was the only mystery.
He had disappointed them badly.
No Cadillac. No guns at present. Once, years before, a tiny .25 semiautomatic, but that belonged to another life lived in another fog.
He’d spent much of the 1990s in a haze. and in late 2002 had technically died for seven minutes. Years later came a heart attack, cancer, and two strokes - rude telegrams from mortality. He called them gifts when speaking honestly. They had stolen movement and returned perspective. Since then, when he closed his eyes at night, he knew they might remain closed. This offended many people who preferred euphemism, but it steadied him.
Creation felt cleaner now than youth ever had.
That first overseas tour had been based not in London but at 21 Harris Avenue in Cardiff, in a council house where glamour had died without heirs. There was no central heating to speak of. A gas fire in the lounge did battle with Welsh March damp and generally lost.
He remembered being asked each morning not whether he wanted coffee, but how he took it. The mug had already been poured. He had never drunk coffee in his life and, unwilling to seem provincial, answered with what he believed men in films said.
Black. Two sugars.
Thus began a lifelong habit.
He drank that first cup while half-frozen, wrapped in a robe, being licked nearly unconscious by a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Xena.
There were always at least three Staffies in the house, often more. They bred them. Xena had chosen him with the unreasonable certainty dogs sometimes reserve for fools and saints. In the lounge stood a settee and one armchair facing the fire. Mr. and Mrs. 2-Tone occupied the settee. He occupied the chair.
Xena sat directly before him and licked his goatee as though polishing a monument.
The other dogs took positions to either side and never challenged her claim.
Visitors who tried to sit in his chair were growled into philosophical reflection.
Months later, if he phoned from America, Xena would hear his voice and become hysterical until someone held the receiver to her ear. He would then speak to the dog long-distance, which was often more satisfying than many human conversations.
He adored Wales with the fervor others reserved for Paris.
Not the brochure Wales of dragons and gift shops, but the Wales where old men in pubs distrusted your politics before learning your name. The Wales where you might be asked why, of all places on earth, you had chosen to come there.
The answer was simple.
Because no one else had. And he'd been invited.
He spent afternoons in pubs such as The Royal Oak hearing boxing lore from men whose noses looked historically significant. He learned that places tourists dismissed often contained the best minds. He once sat in a Leicester pub - The Huntsman - where old men greeted him with, “Oh look, it’s THE YANK,” before denouncing George W. Bush and then, with admirable balance, Tony Blair.
He considered them intellectual giants.
His favorite Welsh memory came by accident.
They had driven to Merthyr Tydfil to collect speakers. Returning, a wreck clogged the motorway. So, 2-Tone improvised a shortcut involving A roads, lanes, and eventually something suitable only for goats and confessions. When a red telephone box appeared on that impossible road, it felt mythic.
Then they emerged into Caerphilly.
And there it was.
Caerphilly Castle rose from the town like history interrupting commerce.
“Pull over,” he shouted. “The American wants to take a look.”
They wandered in and accidentally crashed a wedding. The wedding party, displaying the sort of hospitality no luxury resort could imitate, invited them to join.
Later he bought a Cadbury bar and a bottle of Irn-Bru from a little shop whose labels might as well have been runes.
He thought it a perfect day.
That was how he judged places now.
Not by monuments, but by surprises.
Not by comfort, but by texture.
Not by what travel magazines insisted mattered, but by whether life there could still astonish a stranger.
Years later, when he was in Leicester, he and his British girlfriend made the journey to Cardiff in her tiny Fiat Uno, a machine that seemed held together by optimism, thin metal, and several unresolved noises.
To an American, it was a modest two-hour drive.
To his fiercely local British girlfriend, it might as well have been an expedition across continents.
She drove with the sort of determined tension that suggested every roundabout was a personal enemy. He, meanwhile, enjoyed the scenery and silently made peace with death.
At last they arrived at 21 Harris Avenue.
The front door opened.
There stood Mr. and Mrs. 2-Tone, smiling in welcome.
And behind them, the welcoming committee.
Three Staffordshire Bull Terriers launched forward like released artillery.
Xena was first.
She blasted past human protocol entirely, ignored the assembled adults, and hurled herself toward him with joyous force. There was no dignified reunion. She struck him at knee height, nearly toppled him, then spun in frantic circles before rearing up to smear affection across his coat and face.
His girlfriend, who had expected perhaps tea and polite greetings, instead watched her boyfriend get mugged by a brick-shaped dog screaming with happiness.
Inside, tradition resumed immediately.
He took the old chair by the fire.
Mr. and Mrs. 2-Tone settled onto the settee.
Xena stationed herself directly in front of him and began the solemn work of removing his beard with her tongue.
The other dogs assumed their flanking positions.
His girlfriend, perhaps seeking inclusion, perhaps merely lacking tactical awareness, perched on the arm of his chair.
The room changed.
Xena froze mid-lick.
Then slowly turned her head.
One eye on the intruder.
A low growl emerged from somewhere ancient.
Not rage.
Not panic.
Administrative concern.
His girlfriend stiffened.
He reached down, took Xena’s broad head in one hand, and spoke calmly.
“It’s alright, girl. She’s with me.”
Xena looked from him to the woman, then back again.
This explanation did not satisfy her intellectually, but she accepted it provisionally.
She resumed her post, though with the periodic sideways glance of private security forced to tolerate management decisions.
That night his girlfriend learned several truths.
First, the house belonged to the dogs.
Second, the fire belonged to whoever got there first.
Third, the chair belonged to him.
And fourth, while she was welcome as a guest, the undisputed queen of the premises was a muscular Staffordshire bitch named Xena who loved one American man beyond reason and would, if necessary, defend that love with decisive violence.
His girlfriend slept lightly.
Xena slept soundly.
He slept like royalty.
He would likely never see Lake Baikal. He knew this. His body had spoken.
But some nights, after his medication was sorted and the house gone quiet, he would sit with coffee - black, two sugars - and watch another badly filmed road somewhere east of where he’d ever been.
Then he would close his eyes and travel properly, knowing that should he not wake he would no doubt be greeted at the pearly gates by 80 pounds of canine love named Xena.
copyright notice © 2026 Michael C. Metzger
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