It was after church, right after church, so I didn't even get to take my tie off. The basement was finished and furnished, but it was still a basement, without windows, and my suit felt hot; polyester not breathing, and I was eleven, and church had already been 3 hours long, and then we all said we'd come to Miss McClaine's house after to see her slide show.
She'd laid out nuts and dried apricots along with jell-o salad. It wasn't as heresyish as it sounds because she'd been to Egypt, that's what the slide show was about; so it’s Thematic Snackery. Somebody made a joke about eating a camel that made everybody avoid the meatballs, but the jell-o went pretty quickly. There were marshmallows.
We sat in the front row, my Mom and my Grandmother and Grandfather and I. I had a little paper plate filled with dried fruit. My mother filled a little plate with almonds. I liked dried fruit, even though it was hard to chew, but I only took the appropriate amount at first; then, when nobody else wanted any (this was in the era before dried fruit had really hit the states, save the mighty raisin or noble prune), I went back before the lights turned off and really stocked up. We were missing dinner for this.
Lights down, slide projector on, and that super familiar "Shatook-ik!. Clak!" sound began.
Splo MacClaine, our host, stood to the left (her right, my left) of the screen. She even had some music for the background. It was what my Grandmother called “foreign music”. My Grandmother called lots of stuff ‘foreign’. Ms. MacClaine told stories about the heat and the sand and of course, the pyramids. And sphinxes. Or is it ‘sphinx’ in the plural? There were camels and men wearing long robes and music-that-was-foreign and sand (again).
On the way back home in my Grandfather’s car, my Grandmother said, “Well, that was nice. Now we don’t have to go there.”
“Grandma, “ I said, “she told us that she hoped this might inspire us all to go.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would we go now? She just showed it to us. I’ve seen everything now. Now we don’t have to go.”
This bothered me. You can tell, right? I mean, the whole 44 year retention of incident thing probably tipped you off. It’s just that I hadn’t been anywhere yet, and I was unconvinced that going places was just seeing things. You could do that with a ViewMaster (Oh look! Now I don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon! (click-ik) or Oz (click-ik) or the Moon!). To truly experience a place you have to use all your senses. True, Ms. MacClaine used sight, sound, taste, and even smell in her post-worship TEDx talk. Oh, she wore a “traditional dress” too, so I guess she got touch in there.
Still, that basement was not Egypt.
I’m sure you must have thought about the chance that maybe my Grandmother was just upset that Ms. MacClaine had gone there FIRST, that this story was hers to tell and why do you go somewhere if you can’t come back and tell everybody? But my Grandmother never took a lot of pictures when she went anywhere, and she did have to travel with my Grandfather. There were a couple of airport souvenirs with “Hawaii” or “San Francisco” on them in their house somewhere; I believe the Hawaii one had a little volcano diorama, and they did have one of those spring loaded hula dancer figures (but they never put it in their car).
I think it was less jealousy than water. Grandma liked water. She and Grandpa enjoyed fishing; in lakes, off dams, and especially in the ocean. A little girl born and raised as landlocked as they come, but any boat my grandmother hit the deck of? She was Captain. I once saw Grandma light a full charcoal barbecue grill and cook twelve hot dogs on a pontoon boat no larger than a good sized area rug.
Egypt didn’t have enough water. Now Venice, she’d have LOVED Venice. Except it was in Europe, and she didn’t really enjoy the idea of Europe all that much. Foreign stuff.
We weren’t really a “vacation” family as much as “people who took trips” occasionally. Trips are like vacations with a thing to do added. We went on a trip to look after my pregnant aunt. You could take a trip to the mall to pick up something. Business trips always made sense to me later on because of course there was business, that was the point of a trip, getting something done, and maybe experiencing something the way there. Or back.
And “vacation” never really involved going anywhere, it was defined as the temporary pause of the otherwise necessary. We didn’t “go on vacation”; vacation was just the time circled on the calendar where there was no school or work; at my house it was always a time of contemplation and relaxation… no, I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep there for a minute - at my house, it was ALWAYS time for accomplishing tasks you didn’t have time to do while you were working or at school. So there really wasn’t much of an opportunity to leave the house for an extended period when there was so much to do, right? Maybe we’ll take a trip to the store and get a Dairy Queen dipped cone on the way back.
“Traveling” was, to be brutally honest, what rich people did. No agenda, nothing to get done, no reason to be there except to… enjoy yourself. Yeeesh.
I would watch “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”” on TV and try to imagine what cascading miracles of circumstance might lead me to ever see a real water buffalo. The most feasible scenario is that I might add a major in Zoology with a Radio, Television and Film minor and then join the crew of “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom””. Then every episode would be a trip that I was taking for work, and oh, look, there’s a water buffalo…cool. But the very idea (and let’s be honest I have a pretty good imaginatory thing going on) that I would just wake up one day and say to myself, “I want to see a water buffalo!” and then spend money to do so seemed pretty impossible.
But that’s what traveling was, aimless adventure, best accomplished by circuses, sideshows, and basketball players though I really never understood how that works.
Zoë is the one to plan all the trips, and they are trips, there are things to learn everywhere she’s taken me… it’s only when I try to amble that she becomes cross and bit boneless… “Do you need to go to another record store/comic book store/magic store/toy store?”
“Well, the records/comics/magic tricks/toys here are different.”
“How, are they different?”
And here, I take my gentle stand against my Grandmother’s opinion in that car. I stand tall, in these international places of business, spending my trip allowance on a set of light-up juggling balls or a disappearing flower arrangement or a bouzouki, and I know why exactly I’m drawn to these objects… the subtle difference in size of playing cards in Italy, the unique smell of that particular Moroccan candle… they’re foreign. In fact, it’s the opposite; I’m the foreign one… all those objects are right where they’re supposed to be, they’re at home, I am paying with foreign money and saying “thank you” in a foreign language (or at least accent in the UK). And I like it.
Maybe that’s how my grandmother felt on the ocean; a woman from the Great Plains, adrift on the waves, far from the shore, a foreigner, somehow at home, and the sand dunes of Africa just didn’t do it for her. Or maybe she was hungry after church and the jell-o salad just wasn’t cutting it. I believe we all got barbecue sandwiches on the way home from that event.
Officially, that made it a trip.
Foreign Vacation.