Goodbyes are Hellos
This is now my diary of my month long stay in Paris. This is the part where I begin my travels
I am sitting in the dark, listening to sea lions bark. This means I have not gotten to Paris yet. This means I am as far away as I can be on this continent, but I am also closer. LAX, the portal to Paris, is a mere cab ride away.
It’s night here, and half my children and my husband just woke up to the sunrise. I will see them soon. I said goodbye to the 10 year old, he said hello to giving his Auntie Chis some guinea pig care tips and swimming lessons with his Grandpa. His Great Great Aunt is 102 and I said goodbye to her before I left. She is getting ready for a journey herself so she couldn’t say much. I won’t be able to speak either, when I’m in Paris. I don’t know the language, Aunt Jeanne can’t remember hers.
My mother has told me that when I was a baby leaving the hospital to go home, an old person was entering in. There is a season turn, turn and all of that spinning stuff, but maybe we are all heading home in the end. I suppose that’s how sunrises happen for people when it’s sunset for others, there’s a rotation to it.
I know from reading Bedlam in the Backseat by Janet Gillespie that travel is difficult. That book was my parenting handbook for years, and it looks to be prophetic. I’ve packed it in my luggage along with many paperback Margery Allingham detective books, and considering I only want to bring carry on, and only own a hardback copy, it means it’s a good one.
On a personal level, I am still in chapter one, “We Leave Home”. I am convinced with all the seasons and changes of life, some things are the same. Behold the words written down in 1960 as Janet prepared to travel to Europe for a year:
“By the first of of September I was convinced that our departure for Europe would coincide with, if not actually insure, the outbreak of World War III”
Well, if that’s part of travel preparations I have already checked that box when we bombed Iran a few weeks ago. There’s a bizarre comfort to knowing people have been worrying about the same thing for decades.
Then there is the personal disasters that occur to make you feel like travel is a terrible plan because you can’t even handle your regular life. Janet slipped a disk, her dog had puppies and then she got pneumonia, but so far I have managed to get away with just a music festival and a cracked filling. I chalk this good luck up to a) I am paying the chaos price for a month, not a year like Janet, or b) something terrible is going to happen still before I actually get to Paris. I think it’s interesting that the inscription in my copy says it was gifted at a hospital. It’s a good book on how wonderful being miserable can be, I suppose.
So far, I have gotten my cracked filling repaired, so there’s hope in brokenness. Things break but people fix them. It cracked in the middle of a music festival I was working on, the sort of work that takes you and two out of state trumpet players to a Walmart at 10 pm, the sort of work that has you trying to find harp transportation. Of course there were my teeth to worry about, but also there was a curfew in Los Angeles because of immigration protests right where the concert was supposed to happen. Every day we just kept getting ready for the concert. Every beautiful thing is costly, but worth paying for…this is true for concerts, dentistry, and other things that fill cracks.
The concert happened, which was a miracle too I suppose. We found all the harp transportation, the trumpets got some groceries, the Wagner Tubens were procured and the curfew was lifted. But that was last week.
The music played, and I had my teeth fixed, and the rest of my family arrived in Paris before me, just in time for an epic heat wave.
Then they got sick. I have gotten a lot of doomsday reports. My favorite so far has been from a kid who hadn’t slept for 48 hours, was sick, and hot. “Why does France exist!?”
Why does it? Why does anything?
This is once again in the prophecies of Janet, except in her case she took a boat and her entire family was seasick for days.
“The sight of Bob crouched morosely in the edge of the other berth added a final touch to the paranoid, prison-cell atmosphere of A47. Salvador Dali would have screamed for joy.”
Good thing I had read about this sort of thing happening, or I would have been disappointed at the money and time spent to fly my kids across the world so they could be sick and miserable in another country. Now I just feel like I am on track, and that’s a comfort. Maybe discomfort is art if you look at it like Salvador Dali would. He was kind of weird though.
I saw an article that pointed out that chasing optimal performance is a great way to never perform. If someone tells you how difficult things will be, you might not show up after all. I don’t own one of those watch trackers, and maybe that lack on my part, plus a travel book of chaos from the 1960s is why I think this is still a good idea. If you watch says you need more sleep and if your tooth hurts and if you aren’t even sure the plane will land, why try? Stay safe. Why exist?
I used to lecture him at breakfast and tell him that my father had never had any money and had taken all seven of us abroad. I quoted his advice to his children: Leap before you look or you’ll never do anything.”
There’s a lot to complain about, and it’s all valid. I just stopped chasing optimal performance a long time ago. Now I just show up, do my best and expect nothing great in return. Then? I get really excited if something works out. That’s why I like art; you see the result of the struggle and it’s beautiful. You either forget the struggle, or you paint it like Salvador Dali and make it part of your art.
I have packed a million paperback detective novels in my bag, and my Libby is loaded. I am about to leap and sometimes I try to look and end up having a lot of worry. “What do you MEAN you got into an argument at Pizza Hut? Why are you at a PIZZA HUT in PARIS?”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t leapt yet. Chapter two is “Paris, Mon Coeur”, and that’s my next chapter too.