My mother wanted to see the world.
I don’t know much about her first marriage, just that it was short and didn’t end well. She met my father and I have to imagine that some part of her thought she would get to travel. He was an Air Force reservist. He had seen the world, many times over, but being a reservist and traveling had actually put a strain on his first marriage, and this time he was going to stay put.
“I’d like to see the Grand Canyon,” she said in the kitchen one day. As a family we’d done some summer trips. To the beach, to Disney World, and all up and down the east coast. We’d even gone out to Oklahoma once to visit her sister and her sister’s family. It had never occurred to me, in the way it rarely occurs to most people to think of their parents as “people” until the moment they do, that my mother wanted to see the world.
I had, at that time, recently gone to Mexico with some friends, twice. I had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and gotten engaged. My fiancee was, at that time, studying abroad in England.
“Oh,” I said, “you guys are retired, why don’t you and Dad go?”
This was when I learned, or rather than I finally understood, that my father had seen the world, and didn’t desire to see it again. He liked sitting at home. My mother and I talked for quite a while that day about it. She resolved to talk to her sister, who’s husband also, I think, had seen the world and now wanted to stay home, and the two of them would travel.
I don’t know if she ever talked to her sister, but a year later she succumbed to cancer and had never seen the world, much less the Grand Canyon.
Twenty-three years later, I’m sitting in a pub in London, having a pint and some chips. I’m staring out the window at the street. It’s nothing special, just a street, some buildings, a car parked there, and people occasionally walking by. But it’s a street in London. And I think about my mother, and it’s all I can do to keep from crying while drinking a pint in the pub in London.
Long ago, when my wife was going to school there, I had a reason to go to England, but not the means. Those were my lean years. I’d barely afforded those trips to Mexico, and only had managed it because we go a group rate for the thirty or so of us going. A few years later we would go to Jamaica, for a destination wedding, which almost doesn’t count because the only thing we got to see was the resort. It would be more than a decade before we were in a much more financially stable place and went on a cruise to a few Caribbean locales. We’d do that a few times, on a few different cruise lines.
Almost two years ago an opportunity popped up to go on a cruise in Europe, for the solar eclipse. We’d have to fly to London, pop over to Dover, then the ship would take us to France, Guernsey, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, before returning to Dover. And on one day in there, we’d be at sea for the solar eclipse. The cruise was just 11 days, and since I was having to take off 2 weeks anyway, we’d stay in London for a couple of days on the back end before flying home.
The eclipse at sea was amazing. Perhaps I’ll write about it someday. It was truly a unique experience. But for now, this is how I ended up in a pub in London, drinking a pint, looking out at an English street, and fighting back tears.
When planning this trip, my wife kept asking me what I wanted to do, and I always had the same feeling. I didn’t want to do anything. I was reading all of these excursions, about tours and things to see and stuff to do, and none of it was very appealing. I mean, sure, all of them would be interesting, and we did a bunch of them, which I might write about later, but none of them pulled at me. I just knew I wanted to be there. That was it.
The first pass through London before the cruise was pretty swift. Just one night, and a fancy dinner with friends. And yet, walking the street toward dinner that night, I could feel it there within me. At the time, I didn’t put my finger on it. It was just this feeling of “I’m here.”
I had the feeling again at every stop, each port, each excursion. Standing in Le Havre, in Giverny, in Guernsey, in Rouen, in Vigo, in Lisbon, in Sintra, in Porto, in Le Verdon, in Soulac-sur-Mer, in Zeebrugge, and in Bruges… “I’m here.” It wasn’t until we returned to London, when the whirlwind of the cruise was behind us and we slowed down, wandered through the V&A and sat down at a pub for a bite and to rest our feet, staring out at just a plain regular street in a foreign country that the conversation in my parents’ kitchen came back to me, and I got it.
I wish my mother had gotten to see the world.
I’d like to see the Grand Canyon.