When he married for the second time, Jay Keyser thought he and his wife would settle down on a bucolic little farm in Massachusetts, a place where the cows meet the sea. That was before he found out the awful truth: he had married a travel junkie. While he was envisioning walks along quiet beaches, hand in hand at end of day, her sights were set on stakeouts beside the Grumeti River in Tanzania watching crocodiles take down a baboon. He didn't want to come within six thousand miles of a crocodile, let alone six feet. But, somehow, he couldn't let Nancy go it alone. And so, for the past fifteen years, Jay Keyser has followed his wife around this treacherous world. I Married a Travel Junkie is his chronicle.
A natural born lemonade-maker, our reluctant traveler did his level best to understand not only the extraordinary people and places he visited, but his own internal conflict. As he studied his anxiety across the course of seven terrifying trips to Africa, from the Serengeti National Park to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, he gradually began to accept the profound differences between his wife and himself. Although terrified by them, he has learned from his experiences, most especially from an encounter with an angry female gorilla, who offered key insight into marriage and human nature. Jay Keyser learned to stop and smell the elephant dung.
Author Biography
Samuel Jay Keyser attended George Washington, Oxford and Yale Universities. With a PhD in linguistics from Yale. Keyser has taught at Brandeis University, University College, London, the University of Massachusetts and MIT where he joined the faculty. He is currently Professor Emeritus and Special Assistant to the Chancellor.
Aside from his academic writings, Keyser has written a book of poems "Raising the Dead, " a book of children's poems "The Pond God and Other Stories" (winner of a Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor Book Award), and "Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows," an account of the MIT culture from his vantage point as Department Head, housemaster and Associate Provost (MIT Press: May, 2011). Keyser plays jazz trombone with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, an avant-garde jazz orchestra and the New Liberty Jazz Band, a Dixieland band that plays in the New Orleans style from the back of a restored 1941 Ford fire engine. Between the two bands Keyser has appeared on more than a dozen CDs.
