OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO

I have long been developing a list of places that I would like to visit. We all have ideas about what foreign places might be like. We imagine the delights or perils entailed in traveling there. We harbor images of what a place might be like which usually enfolds on our level of attraction or repulsion toward a place. For some reason, Central and South America seem more foreign, more dangerous to me than most of Asia. 

North Korea might be an exception to this of course.

That is not to say that a pleasant stroll around the Favelas of Rio 

would be any more dangerous than strolling through Tiananmen Square during a protest. 

It is also not the case that a trip to South America might hold any more cause for concern than an evening on Frenchmen St in New Orleans. 

In reality these places are where the life is, and if we are to avoid them, we are missing out on some of the best music, most beautiful people, the greatest art, and the pulse of the liveliest street life in the world. I would also miss taking all the best photos.

We choose the places that we would most like to visit based on words, images, scenes that we have conjured up from our experiences. There is not always a pattern or a basis in reality for what we might expect to see and do. We carry our pre-conceived ideas about a place to that place and often see that place through the tint of the glasses that we choose to wear. 

When I lived in India, I would ask other foreigners what they thought of India. The two most common and extreme responses were that it was a very spiritual place or that it was a place full of suffering and death. I would ask these folks what they had thought India would be like before they left home, and I found that their answers would reflect closely how they came to actually see that great sub continent.

So, this Summer I will continue to chip away at my travel and event bucket lists. I will be checking Portugal off in July, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.

Edinburgh

Porto, Portugal

After that, the world is my oyster as they say. Here are some visual highlights gleaned from the Internet.  You can also see a larger variety on my Pinterest board “My Travel Bucket List.” If you would prefer to look at some of the places that I have traveled to in the past you might look at my "Places I Have Been" board.

St. Peterburg, Russia

Thailand

Queensland, New Zealand

Viet Nam

Prague, Czech Republic

Tiger's Nest Monastery, Bhutan

THE LONG GOODBYE

It is two weeks since my original retirement date, two weeks until my re-scheduled retirement date, and six weeks until the day that I will finally retire. It was three and a half months ago that I gave notice and now, today I have some finality that five months after that date I will be actually retiring.

ORIGINAL:14 days ago

REVISED: 14 days to go

NEW: 6 more weeks

Okay, that wasn’t exactly as I planned it, but it works out well for everybody involved. Things change and sometimes we have to roll with the punches. I was letting the uncertainty get to me and now I have to allow the relief of knowing to flow over me like a calming breeze. The end really is in sight and it is all becoming real once again.

Now I can truly start to look forward to the future. I will get to experience a reduced workweek during the month of June. I will be able to make better preparations for my planned videography. This will mean practicing with my new video camera 

Sony AX100

and learning editing techniques, and some of the complexities of inputting and exporting different kinds of footage to make a cohesive outcome.

The month of June promises to be the first month in 30 years where I will be working part time. I will have several 4-day stretches to explore. It will be a good lead-in for my trip and ultimately the rest of my life, sometimes known as retirement.

MOTHERS DAY

 

My Mother, Dora Saunders nee Miller

Mothers’ Day this year falls on Sunday, May 8. It is also the thirtieth anniversary of my mother’s death. She died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 64 and missed out on the final third of her life. I will be 63 on Monday and this was the date that I had originally set to retire. A part of me realizes how precious life is and my plan is to live much longer than my mother did. Nevertheless humans are quite fragile and there are no guarantees. 

I remember my mother for her kindness and for the way that she loved us two kids. People enjoyed my mother and she liked being around people. I owe much of my self-assurance to her unwavering confidence in me.

Here is a section from a short but true story that I wrote several years ago, about my mother’s death.

My paternal grandmother, whom we called by the Yiddish term “Booba,” moved in with us in 1964 when we moved to a council flat, or ‘maisonette’ on Swaton Road. Her head was balding and her top lip sprouted a soft moustache; there was a noticeable bump on the top of her head. 

Booba

She found her place at the ‘head’ of the table and sat there quietly most of the day. She drank tea and dunked her digestive biscuits. She preferred to wash her clothes in an enamel basin on the stove. When she got cold she would warm up the tea kettle and hold her hands close to it for heat.

Years later when I heard that my grandmother had died, I rushed home with the intention of comforting my parents. As I approached the corner of Campbell Road and Rounton Road, close to where my parents lived, I began to feel light-headed. I looked up at the sky above the railway bridge and it seemed to me as though the whole sky was filled with the image of my Booba. She smiled down at me with a reassuring beneficence. I was filled with both sadness and gratitude as I entered my parents’ home. My mother was crying in her domain - the kitchen. I walked past her to my father. After all it was his mother who had died. I went straight to the living room where he sat in his usual armchair. I put my arm around him and we both cried. I believe that this was the first and only time I ever saw him in tears.

L-R: My Father, his Mother (Booba), & his Father circa 1922

It was some thirteen years later that my own mother died. By this time I had traveled afar, gotten married, was living in Wisconsin, and my wife was five months pregnant. It was the day before my birthday. I came home after work with a parcel that I had picked up from the post office that morning. The package was filled with a variety of English chocolates that my mother had sent me. I had been notified of the arrival of the package and had gone to the post office several days earlier, only to find that for some reason it had been forwarded to Chicago. The parcel had been tracked down and returned to Madison where I finally was able to collect it. As I tore open the brown paper wrapping, the telephone rang, and it was my brother letting me know of my mother’s sudden death. She had apparently had a heart attack and died in the street. It was a Thursday evening and my mother was to be buried as soon as possible. I asked if they could delay the funeral until I got there, and could hear my father in the background frantically screaming, “No. We have to bury her tomorrow. It’s the law!” I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner that night to quietly celebrate my birthday. When I called to cancel, my friend told me that a surprise birthday party had actually awaited me that evening. He would call to let people know what had happened.

I flew to England as soon as I could and arrived the next afternoon. I had missed my mother’s funeral. My father met me at the underground station and we walked back to his flat. 

My Father in his prime

He told me how during their last week together, he and my mother had become ‘closer than ever.’ He thought that there was some sense of premonition, as though she were trying to make amends for the pain and suffering in their marriage. It seemed to my more cynical self that this was more likely a part of the grieving process, my father trying to put things into a manageable perspective, perhaps assuaging guilt and replacing it with a more tractable version of reality. Nevertheless, my father seemed shell-shocked. I worried for him. How would this man ever function without the woman who had looked after him for the last forty years, had cooked for him, laundered his clothes and changed the bedding, had cleaned the house and done the grocery shopping. As I was thinking these things, we turned a corner near where my father lived. “This is the spot where your mother keeled over and died,” he told me. A familiar light-headedness returned, my knees felt weak, and at that moment I realized that this was the very place that I had seen the vision of my grandmother all those years before. 

COUCH COMMANDER

I guess I am not the only one who will be dealing with lots of spare time in the near future. President Obama teamed up with a cast of characters to take a look at some of the aspects of living the post-workplace lifestyle. This video is from the 2016 White House Press Correspondents' dinner: