Diary

 

I have crossed the Atlantic on ships before, but usually it has been from west to east, Florida to Europe. My one crossing the other direction took me from London to Iceland and Greenland, an then to Montreal, which had a very different feel from just going straight over the course of five days, as I just did,  from the Old World to the New.

This afternoon, the coast of Newfoundland showed up through a light dusting of hail on my balcony after a day of gale force winds and a fairly bouncy and choppy ride on the North Atlantic. I have gotten used to crossings and didn’t feel any sense of hallelujah at the sighting of land, but as I stood in the observation lounge on the ship overlooking the bow, I did feel a sense of camaraderie with the other people there, that we had all done this together.

When the ship was cleared by Canadian immigration around 5PM, surprisingly few people hurried down to go ashore to touch land, but i was one of them.  I packed totally wrong for wet weather in the 40-50F degree temperature range, and overnight temperatures close to freezing. I hate cold feet, so I hurried off to an outdoor outfitters store to buy a pair of wool socks and waterproof shoes. I have both these things at home and it drives me crazy to duplicate things I rarely use, but I want to enjoy the rest of this trip with warm, dry feet, so enough said.   It was funny though, because by the time I tried on shoes and got to the cashier, everyone in line was from the ship, having come away from home equally unprepared,

This is all a preamble to what I really want to say, and that is that at dinner tonight, by myself for a change,  outdoors on the pool deck with heat lamps and blanket (my favorite solo venue), I got to thinking about what it means to have crossed from the Old to the New World.  I felt a little giddy at the sense of being home. It was, of course, home in the most abstract of ways, because I am in Newfoundland, to which I have no personal connection.

Still, I found myself thinking about what it means to have one’s psyche formed in the New World.  I don’t pretend to know what is it like to be raised in the  British Isles or mainland Europe, but it seems to me that one must feel something about being the inheritor of well over a millennium of history, whereas I grew up in a culture where the meaningful past barely spans a generation or two.

I am part of a culture that traditionally has responded more to  open spaces than boundaries. I know I am speaking from the privileged outlook of being white in the world of which I speak, but still, being of the New World does relieve one of at least some of the burden of history, as much as it equally leaves one adrift without much sense of history at all.

This continent opens itself to possibilities, is steeped in reinvention, and  asks few questions about people’s pasts (tabloid journalism aside). I have been throughout my life so blessed with opportunities to change course, to  change me. It almost seems a requirement in this culture to be dissatisfied, and a defect of personality or character not to do something about discontent. It can be a scary, insecure world indeed, but an exciting place if one is at home in it.

I left the town of my childhood at age 12, and moved again at 13 and 14 to new schools in new cities.  Every time, I felt elation at being able to shed what I didn’t like about myself and embrace what I  believed I was becoming. This rather nomadic life made me very comfortable with change, eager to try new things, and not particularly attached to anything.  I think I would have done well as a pioneer in a former time. Now, in the 21st century, my pioneering means something different, keeping my life  interesting, growing, and productive.  Welcome home, I tell myself tonight, although part of being from the New World is to be home wherever I am.

Often people comment on how footloose and fancy free my life is, and often I wonder whose life they are talking about.  I am traveling the world, to be sure, but as that expression goes, “wherever you go, there you are.”

I bring my personality with me everywhere, and most of the time it serves me well. I am optimistic, resilient, and good at seeing things from multiple perspectives.  I can fairly easily see the good in people and situations, and when I am disappointed I can shrug things off fairly easily as life lessons.

Reluctance is a word I have never seen in the plural, so I will invent it here. I have a few reluctances that have made me less able to enjoy this traveling life as fully as i would like.

First, I am reluctant to take any risks in port that might cause me to miss the ship.  Of course it makes sense to not want to be stranded, especially in my role, where it would affect me professionally as well as personally.  I don’t have any problem choosing not to do utterly stupid things,  like going far from the ship with only a dicey plan for  transportation back, but I sometimes am prone to being too cautious.

And sometimes I’m not.  I met a couple who live in Bangkok who told me if I was ever there, they wanted to show me around.  I had a stop in Bangkok, and we set a plan months in advance, not realizing that the ship would have to dock about forty miles from the city. My friend, who is an airline executive and the owner of a travel agency, said not to worry, he would send one of his guides and drivers to meet Dan and me and drive us in.  We had a fairly short port call, which meant that we would only have a couple of hours in Bangkok.  There were tours going into the city, and of course if they were delayed, the ship would wait for them, but it’s tough luck if you go out on your own and don’t get back.

Dan wanted to cancel, given that traffic was unpredictable, and I might have gone along, except that Charin, my friend , had gone so out of his way to make it happen, and geez, it’s Bangkok!  We would otherwise have spent the day in a boring container port with nothing to do.  So I decided to go, and Dan decided that since I was going, he was too.  Maybe he was thinking it I missed the ship he would rather be stuck with me than sailing off without me.

Anyway, Bangkok was fabulous. I can’t wait to go back and see more.  We had an abbreviated city tour, a great lunch , and then we were on our way back.  We got to the ship with only about a half-hour to spare, and if traffic had been heavier, I doubt we would have.  That close timing was in retrospect a good argument for reluctance on the stop in Bangkok, but I am glad I didn’t let my cautious side prevail.

It’s little things that get me annoyed with myself.  Yesterday was one of those times.  We were supposed to dock in Greenwich but because of weather conditions ended up further down the Thames at Tilbury.  Because it was an embarkation and debarkation day, there wasn’t a regular shuttle transporting guests into town and back, but a special intermittent shuttle to pick up and drop off people in Greenwich who were planning to begin or end the voyage there, and now had to deal with the changed plans.  I decided to hop on the shuttle to explore the town, but as I waited on the shuttle bus, I semi-seriously considered getting off and spending the day on the ship. As we were pulling away from the ship, I felt that glimmer of dread that I had just voluntarily created a situation where it was not  completely in my hands to get back to the ship on time (i.e. walking distance)

”What have I done?” I asked myself as we drove away, and ruminated much of the drive about how many backup plans I could put in place to get back the twenty-odd miles to the ship.  At the other end, I didn’t leave the shuttle stop point until I had heard from about three different people exactly where I needed to be and when.

Then I was fine. I had a fun time wandering around the town and got back just fine, but not very happy with myself for ever having built up such a simple jaunt into an imaginary crisis. I’ve got to keep working on that reluctance, but I remind myself that yesterday I did indeed overcome it a little.

I made some progress on my second reluctance yesterday as well.  Let’s call this one Culinary Reluctance. I don’t have a cast iron gut, and even less so as I get older.  I will spare the details, but it comes down to being generally very uneasy  about  eating food off the ship. I watch these shows about great street food, and I am so envious, but I just don’t dare.

Now that I am on ships so much, I get really tired of the food onboard.  In St. Petersburg this summer there was a Siberian cafe just across the street from the ship and after trying mushroom ice cream there (surprise yum) and rye bread and honey ice cream (another surprise yum) with my Russian friend Tatyana on my last stop in St. Petersburg for the season, I have vowed I am having lunch there or elsewhere every time next summer when I do the Baltic again. Likewise I have made a resolution to have lunch ashore at least sometimes in every port, just to make sure I am not missing out on the highlights of a visit.  Yesterday in Greenwich, in addition to taking the shuttle, which I described above, I decided to live up to my new promise to myself, so I stopped in a pub and had fish and chips and a pint of lager.  Yes, indeed I did!

Today I had another great day, this one with very little trepidation, because I was in the care of friends Peter and Sue, with me here. who live in Cornwall not too far from our port in Falmouth.  They picked me up and took me to a beautiful garden with paths that meander down to the sea.  What a great outing it was, and I even had soup and a scone without worrying about it. You see me at the top of this post, ready to dig in!   I am now back on board, and on my way to being a better, braver Laurel!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not often I find a word so special and so perfect  that I wonder how I ever got along without it.  Yes, I am a coddiwompler, and proud of it!  It’s not that hard to travel purposefully, or to wander around without a destination, but it’s quite a different thing to travel purposefully toward—well, who knows?

I am writing in the Frankfurt airport, waiting for my connection to Lisbon where I will catch a ship tomorrow. I know exactly where I am going, and when I get on the ship I know what the ports will be, so there’s no really coddiwompling about any of that.

But that word “destination” has another set of connotations.  How differently we use the word “destiny,” though obviously the root must be the same.  A destination may be where you’re think you’re going, but turn out to be someplace very different indeed.  If you get on the wrong train, suddenly your destination is where the tracks are going.

I am—we all are— going toward what we may in retrospect see as our destiny, although looking back we may have thought at the time we were headed somewhere else.  Destinies—and destinations— are like that.  Actually, in my life I would have to say that often what I didn’t know would happen ended up better than what I had planned or imagined. The “wrong” turn ends up being so right because it took me to a place  I would otherwise have missed, to a person I might never have met, to an insight I  might never have had.

Sometimes I recite an old travel mantra I came up with in the infinitely frustrating and wonderful city of Venice: “I’m not lost, I’m just not where I expected to be.” I coddiwompled, setting out with a purpose and ending up somewhere else. But ‘ending up” doesn’t really describe it. Where I am is always a pause on the way to something else, whatever it ends up being. And that is just fine with this coddiwompler.

 

 

 

I am flying at the moment over Hudson Bay, on my way back to San Diego after nearly two months in the Baltic. Earlier today, on the the first leg, I flew into Gatwick and saw the beautiful checkerboard of fields and hedgerows in the south of England.  This scene was my first glimpse of the world  beyond California, when I flew into Gatwick to begin my year in Edinburgh on my university’s Education Abroad program.

I did the math and realized that my first time to glimpse this sight was almost exactly fifty years ago—a half century!—having left home in early September of 1969.

This anniversary is paired with another that reached the century mark a few days ago.  August 20  marked the one hundredth anniversary of my mother’s birth.

Reflecting on my mother’s life, one of my strongest emotions is pain.  Not because she was a bad mother—far from it—but because she was such a good one.  Jean was intelligent and accomplished, but lived in a time when no one gave much thought to what a woman should do with her life beyond being a wife and mother. She had a master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, and worked before her marriage in the new field of electroencephalograms (EEGs) at the Mayo Clinic.  She and my father, who was a young physicist at the start of his career, fell in love and got married.

And that was it for her professional life. Within a few years she was  mother to me and my older sister, and turned her prodigious energy and creativity into being the best Girl Scout leader and PTA volunteer on the planet.

There was always a lot of affection between my mom and dad, and I think it was a good marriage, though I only saw it through the lens of my own childish needs.  I never once heard them raise their voice to each other.  Perhaps they did in private, and perhaps it was more their way to handle anger with silence.  If I had one complaint about their child rearing it would be that I never learned from my parents how to have a disagreement with a spouse, and more important, how to resolve it.  When I compare this shortcoming to the drama many people I know grew up with, it sounds rather silly to complain, so I don’t. 

Every once in a while I was aware that my mom was upset (and of course I knew  quite well when she was mad at me), but she kept her thoughts and feelings to herself and I have no idea what they were.

It is far too late to ask, as she died in her early 60s, over three decades ago. I knew I should ask her about her life around the time my children were born and I gained perspective on what it means to be a mother, but it just seemed easier not to go there, so I never did.

I suspect, however, that she was unhappy with her life. She must have wanted—dreamed of—so much more.  I can’t help but think she must have harbored more than a little resentment for how her life had gotten so circumscribed— maybe while she was ironing, or doing the dishes, or vacuuming up our messes..  She loved us, but I don’t think she loved motherhood, and definitely didn’t love keeping house.

She had a few friends while I was growing up, but I don’t think she spent a lot of time with them, and I cannot imagine my mother unburdening herself to them.  Maybe she complained mildly about my dad, maybe she shared some worries about my sister and me, but I doubt the question “how are you?” got more than an offhand “I’m fine.” She was a victim of The Feminine Mystique, and when I gave her a copy of  Betty Friedan’s book by that name year later, when I was in grad school, she was bowled over by how well it described her life.  Even then, I didn’t ask, “how so?”

I smile now to think of how little effort my mother put into our meals. Casseroles with Campbell’s cream of celery soup (we thought mushrooms were boogers, so that staple was out) were on the menu every week in our house, because she stuck over and over again with the few things she knew we’d eat.  Lunch was Franco-American spaghetti, or maybe a minimalist sandwich.  And now I think, “Good for you, mom!“ I’m glad she allowed herself at least that much resistance.

I don’t mean to sound like our house was veiled in misery.  My mom was cheerful and upbeat most of the time.  She was thoughtful and focused on what was best for us, and I owe her so much for encouraging the drive that enabled me in a luckier generation to go as far as I could dream possible.

I just wish I could thank her.  More than that I wish it weren’t too late to listen.

Someone posted this on Facebook today, and it touched me so deeply I want to share.  It is so easy to connect with people by any means that say “I see you.”  A compliment.  Remembering a name  Eye contact. Remembering a detail from the last conversation we had. Noticing a change in hair, a color that flatters, an extra sparkle in the eye or wrinkle in the brow.

Right now I am working on eliciting a smile from a particular person who works on the ship. A smile may be out of the question culturally, and I can see he is very intent on his job, so it is a challenge. Yesterday  I got a little wave from across the room.  Success!  On his terms, if not mine.  I say “I see you” by smiling and calling him by name.  His wave says “I see you back.”And as this poet says, these fleeting moments are what we have of if not the holy, at least a kind of grace. Thank you for seeing me by reading this.

I am in Saint Petersburg for the third time of six projected total visits this summer. I really had no idea how i would feel about going around and around the Baltic for two months, most of the time back and forth from Copenhagen to Stockholm.

Maybe I would be bored.  I mean, how many times can I visit Tallinn, Estonia, and still feel invigorated about it?

All I can say is, I still pinch myself and say, “lucky, lucky me!”

Today, visit three to Saint Petersburg (this year), second day:  I had for breakfast some perfect fruit someone else had cut up and cleaned up after.  Then i went and did a little upper body at the gym.  Reviewed and added a few of my own photos to my lecture on Stockholm.  Had a light lunch of salads and my big splurge dessert, bread pudding.  YUM!

Then, the day took on steam.  I used my visa to get off the ship and take a six-mile walk through St. Petersburg, along the Neva, then across the river and on to the Hermitage and up the big shopping street, Nevsky Prospekt.  Then I wandered back, past St. Isaac’s Cathedral and along a green strip,  across the river and to the ship.

Walking back through the main bar (sort of the Grand Central for the ship), I ran across a family i had met briefly before and sat down and chatted with them.  Of course i was immediately approached by a waiter who brought me some champagne which i had totally earned by then on my walk.

I went back then, took a shower, called Dan, and then went out to dinner with some lovely people in a beautiful restaurant, where I could eat and drink whatever I wanted, no charge. What i want at this point is very little, but it doesn’t matter.  I have what works for me, no more.

On my way back to my room, I stopped in the bar and listened to a Ukrainian pianist play the slow movement of The Moonlight Sonata.  Now, back in my room, i found myself wondering why anyone would ever ask if i am tired of this.

Let me explain in one word, if this description of my day doesn’t do it:  No.

Sure, there are many things I am missing in this nomadic, cruising  life: the powerful silence of nature, the humbling experience of great mountain peaks, the lovely affirmation of being truly alone.  But really, what i have is so wonderful I simply cannot express how warm and wooly I feel to have found this life.  Thank you, powers of the universe! I hope this photo of me and my visa, as i leave the ship,  says how much i know I am truly blessed.

Today I passed a milestone.  I finished the last lecture I had hoped to do before I leave for the Baltic in three day’s time.  I am already packed and with all major must-dos accomplished.  That gives me three whole days in which I don’t have to head straight from morning coffee into the study to work, or check a bunch of items off a to-do list.  Pure, free time!

So i thought I would spend a little of it catching up with myself via writing a blog post.  I’ve written in the past about feeling a little disoriented and disengaged from San Diego, and that continues.  I am still hovering outside myself measuring just how I am reacting, and discovering my most honest, basic thoughts.

About a week ago the renters in my condo moved out, leaving it vacant.  That was pretty great, because it enabled me to move my clothes that had been crammed in Dan’s closet and taking up space on his shelves.  I could get ready for my next trip by letting the sprawl get as big as it needed to be and last as long as was convenient for me.  As I started hanging clothes up in the empty closet, I thought, “wow, this is really nice,” and felt the first glimmers of reconnection with my condo.

Before, as I have written, whenever I saw the inside of my condo or even passed by the door, I felt nothing at all, as if it had no connection to me. Now here I was, happily moving about 5% of the way back in, however briefly.  And I liked it.  I even took a shower in “my” shower, something I haven’t done for fifteen months.

But it all seemed rather transactional, not personal.  When I was done, I left.  I still haven’t sat on the couch, for example, or made a cup of coffee there.

I realized that the feeling of grounding I got from hanging up the clothes was pretty much  the way it feels when I unpack on the ship.  it’s good to get things in order, to survey what I have. So I ended up thinking that the excitement of having space wasn’t really tied to it being my condo at all.  If it had been someone else’s I think I would have felt about the same.

Then, a second change. My son called to tell me he was moving back to California and when I learned he needed a place to stay, I decided to cancel looking for a new tenant and let him live in my place while I am in the Baltic this summer.  That meant bringing bedding and towels back from storage to get ready for him.

When I finished making the bed and saw my own bedspread as opposed to a bare mattress pad, it started to feel a little more like my place.  But as I write this I just realized that even though it looks so pristine and clean, and just as I like it, I didn’t even lie down on the bed when I was done.  I just noticed how nice it looked, and turned around and left.   No imprinting, no bonding.

I love metaphors and I wish there were a better one with the hangers.  I’m not hanging, I’m not hanging in, I’m not hanging on.  It’s more like I am hovering in midair, not needing a hanger at all. And not particularly wanting one.  Maybe the metaphor isn’t quite as lame as i thought. I am still floating very pleasantly in the present.  Maybe a time will come when I hang my clothes up with a sense of relief that I do have a place to nest for a while.  All I know is it hasn’t happened yet.

 

 

 

 

 

A little over a month ago I returned to San Diego after five months away on a series of cruise assignments. I haven’t written any entries here since I left the ship in Athens, and I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because I have been puzzling over what to make of this extended time away from what has become my “real life” on ships.

Fifteen months now of Living Travelly and one month on land provides a good vantage point to examine life in the city I have called home for over half a century. It’s been a chance to step outside myself and ask what about life here in San Diego is genuine connection and what is habit, what the relationship is between familiarity and a true sense of  comfort, and the big question: what do I need to do to be what feels most authentically like the person I am now, and supports the growth I want to continue to have?

About five or six years ago, I felt a staleness in my life that I worked through by asking myself, “what about your life makes you feel as if you are growing by doing it, and what doesn’t?”  The upshot was that I quit both the boards I was serving on, because I saw no place that service was going.  More important, even though I still loved my work as a professor, I was ready to move on.  I used to think I would retire when they carried me out on a stretcher, but I understood at that point that to continue to grow as a teacher, I would have to reinvent how I taught, which wasn’t a goal I wanted to take on in my sixties. I could still do the all-in job of teaching that I always had, but now with an understanding that I wasn’t going anywhere with it beyond the value it had in and of itself.

I see life in San Diego now from the vantage point of this odd kind of half-return, one in which I can’t just fall into my old routines, because I vacated my condo to rent it out, and my car is on the other side of the country with my son.  But I can also see my life on ships at a bit more remove because I have been away longer than I ever have since I started this adventure.

So I ask the same question.  “What about your life on ships makes you feel as if you are growing by doing it.” The answer is still quite a lot.  Seeing things for myself is important to me, and I am seeing so much more of the world, however fleetingly, than I could ever hope to do with my own resources.  My brain is working ashore in ways I enjoy, making connections between things, evaluating what I think, turning book learning into tangible sights and sounds.  There is a constant parade of people onboard who provide stimulating conversation and opportunities to learn. I get to use my skills and knowledge in my lectures, and keep improving them as I see and learn more.

And in San Diego?  I keep occupied in San Diego mostly by working on lectures for upcoming assignments.  Beyond playing a little tennis and spending time with Dan and friends, I haven’t reconnected with my old life. I am not here long enough even to consider taking on any new activities. I am marking time as productively as I can, but little more.

I basically do two things with my life now: cruise, and prepare for cruises.

But I hear a drone in the background. I won’t continue to Live Travelly forever.  I have my bookings already through the end of 2020, and there will be significant enough breaks between them ( by choice) that I will need to resume living in my condo and get a car. That will probably help me feel a little more grounded here, but is that what I want?  I don’t think I upheaved my comfortable life just to go back to it. It won’t be enough for me. And I am not the same me.

I won’t be able to hide behind work on lectures when I have fewer assignments and most itineraries already prepared.  I will be smack up against the need to find and embrace what’s next.  I know, I know—there are lots of things to do.  The old saws—take up a new hobby, volunteer. But absent any belief that something new represents a direction for growth of a sort I want, they are more like should than wants, and I have promised myself I won’t be ruled by should any more.

I don’t have to decide anything now, and for that I am grateful. Tennis this morning, then work on a lecture.  My life at the moment. That, plus what still feels like limitless opportunities to keep growing.  All I have to do is rise up to meet them.

 

I am a few hours in to my flight back to San Diego from Athens and am writing somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.  I disembarked this morning and the ship already feels very far away.

It’s been an overwhelming five-plus months, since I flew to Singapore back on December 3. Last year— now it’s the middle of May already! One day has come and gone, replaced by the next one, and on and on. It doesn’t seem as if any time has passed at all, but yet, when I review everywhere I have visited my astonishment grows.

I visited in the last half year alone, 55 places in 21 countries, spread over 4 continents (6 if you count India and the Middle East separately). And that isn’t even counting the first eight months of my Years of Living Travelly, which started in South America, and took me to Europe, Africa, the Baltic, Alaska, Canada  and the Eastern Seaboard  of the US.

I don’t even know how many different lectures I have given since December, but my guess is over 40, the vast majority prepared from scratch in the year or so I spent getting ready for this.

I suspect people back home  are going to ask me to rattle off various sorts of things—highlights, favorites, surprises, and the like, and I must admit I am dreading dealing with that, probably multiple times, when I am home. It’s rather like seeing someone you haven’t laid eyes on for twenty years and asking, “so, what have you been up to?”  I  hardly know what to say, but in the interest of practicing, here are a few standouts.

I was really surprised by how much I liked Asian cities. I fell in love with Hong Kong, and really enjoyed being in Singapore, Ho ChinMinh City, Yogyakarta, and Bangkok.  Mumbai as well.  I loved the bustle, and the foreignness of people selling strange street food, seeing  pagodas instead of churches, and just experiencing how people go about their lives.

Another surprise was the beautiful Philippine Islands, and on the other side, discovering that I came to the Maldives too late to see the paradise I had pictured. And though I wasn’t bowled over by Bali, I think I can conclude with certainty that any country that grows rice (and I saw quite a few) is going to have loads of beautiful scenery.

I was saddened by the poverty I saw so many places, and sobered to learn that much of the hope for development is coming from Chinese investments. When the dust settles, China will effectively own many Asian countries, it seems, and the saddest part is that they are building for themselves and their convenience, not to improve the lives of the locals—resorts for Chinese tourists, roads and bridges to modernize these countries to make them more attractive to the Chinese.  Built, in many cases, with imported Chinese workers, leaving the impoverished people of places like Sihanoukville, Cambodia (one place I observed this Chinafication) no better off.

Okay, I have my first  batch of talking points taken care of, except to add that, as with any travel, I come back with more of a sense of human commonality,  and with my heart—how can I put this?— a little closer to the surface.  When a community suffers, I care a little more, both for places I have been, like Christchurch, and places I have not. I picture children playing, old people with wisdom written on their faces and troubles written in their bones, young people hanging out with their friends or playing their courtship games, people riding on rickety bicycles or motorbikes with impossible piles of just about everything (including extra people) heaped on board, women with their beautiful little ones in slings on their backs, and i wish health, safety, and happiness for them, along with everyone else making their way in this demanding, difficult, often terrifying and sometimes transcendently beautiful world.

What up next for me is six weeks of heavy lifting, as I prepare talks for Scandinavia and the Baltic this summer, plus a gig that will take me from Lisbon to London to New York in the fall. Further out, I am booked to return to Dubai in November to cross the Indian Ocean to Singapore and then spend about two months in Australia and New Zealand over the holidays, returning home in February 2020.  No five- month stints, though. The longest is about three.  My excitement for doing this is undimmed, and I can hardly wait for the next adventure. But for now, a few weeks in San Diego will be adventure enough!

Several days ago I went on a shore excursion from the port of Safaga, Egypt, to Karnak Temple and the Valley of the Kings and Queens in Luxor.  Despite the long bus ride (3.5 hours each way), this had been the most eagerly anticipated event of my entire assignment from Mumbai to Athens.

I was lucky enough a number of years back to go to Cairo and Alexandria, but wondered how in the world I was ever going to manage to get farther south to see the great monuments of the New Kingdom, particularly Karnak and the Mortuary Shrine at Deir al Bahri of one of my heroines, the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who was chiseled out of the historical record  for the audacity of having been a woman on the throne.

This unanticipated chapter in my life, when I can spend pretty much all my time exploring the world, has taken me so many places that, quite frankly, I would never have been able to see on my own dime.  It has also given me the ability to focus my money on side trips between cruises to places like Bhutan and New Zealand and on longer stays in embarkation and debarkation points like Hong Kong and Singapore.

And it’s not over yet.  Insha’Allah (If God wills it), as my Muslim friends say to avoid sounding cocky about the future, I have another nine months of pretty much full time traveling ahead before I plan to scale it back at least enough to make it worthwhile to reclaim my condo from the renter and my car from my son and live at least a slightly more settled life.  Maybe.  Who knows?

This is a long preamble to the modest point I want to make in this blog post.  I have, in at least one post, focused on what is clearer  about myself since I began My Year(s) of Living Travelly. One thing I already made note of was driven home more forcefully in my short time in Egypt.

I came on this excursion to be bowled over by Karnak and by the tomb of  Nefertari, recently opened to the public after a major, state-of-the-art restoration.  Both lived entirely up to expectations.  But what I found myself most moved by, and thinking about the most in the days that followed, was what I observed about Ramadan from the window of the coach.

We happened to be there on the first day of Ramadan, and were told not to worry, that it should have no impact on our tour.  And the shore excursion folks were absolutely right about that in one sense.  Nothing was closed, nothing slowed down.  In fact one of the strongest features of this month of daylight fasting is that life does go on.  People were doing their jobs, from standing sentry on the highway, to  carrying hay on a donkey cart to their animals, to selling produce to people who were preparing the dinner that would break the fast or daytime meals for  children and the ill, who do not fast.

But in another more emotionally resonant way, they got all wrong.  It did impact my trip.  It made it infinitely richer. Sure, I knew from teaching world religions for many years, about the rules of Ramadan, but I knew very little about the culture of it. On the way back, the sun was going down and the first day of fasting was coming to an end.  The energy I could see and sense through the coach window was palpable (though the photos I took are pretty blurry). It still wasn’t dark, but people were hovering near tents and open spaces where long tables had been set up, and a whole pita bread was already sitting on each plate.

The mosques were lit up with strings of lights, and the joy of the moment was written on all the faces.  Everyone was waving to us as we passed.  One guide said half0jokingly that we had better not stop because if anyone got on board we would all be invited to break the fast with them, and we wouldn’t make it back to the ship before it sailed. A far cry from our fear-ridden society, where the idea  of a Muslim breaking onto a bus would be more likely to instill terror in the heart.

One of our escorts had a box stored overhead on the bus, which he got down and devoured the contents of as soon as it was officially okay.  On the streets, people were handing out styrofoam containers filled with food to anyone who needed one. Someone came along with a big tray full of cups of coffee ready to give out to passersby.

One of the things I think the west has failed to understand about Islam is the cohesion that being Muslim offers in this world.  All around the world, as the sun sets in their time zone, this scene of breaking the fast was being repeated, just as all around the world, like the wave in a stadium, five times a day, as prayer time comes, Muslims take their turn falling to their knees to remember Allah and reaffirm their submission to  his will. Circling the world over and over again in perpetuity—what a powerful bond that must create. It was such a privilege to see a little glimpse.

When I remember that day, I will recall standing among the immense columns of the the Temple at Karnak, and the dazzling colors of the beautiful love story Ramses ordered painted on the tomb of his beloved wife Nefertari. But the most indelible impression will be of smiling people waving at us, piles of styrofoam containers of food,  and flashing colored lights on mosques as the shadows deepened and the day drew to a close.

 

A historical novelist friend of mine once said in a speech at a conference, “while you are writing about the past, don’t forget to live in the present.”  My reaction to this day tells me I am getting better at that.

What I think this  experience, and indeed all my experiences in my travels, was really about is the reaffirmation of the fact that I can admire the past, visit its monuments, wonder at its achievements, and imagine its vitality, but right now is what is real, and today is the only place I live.