Travel Ling, Lingering #TGIF #FTSF

“Oh, the places you’ll go.”

Thanks, Dr. Seuss, for that one. I love that and the travel it hints at, alludes to. It’s thrilling, just writing that quote and reading it back to myself. I recently carried that quote with me, on my first solo trip to Mexico, reciting it in my mind whenever I needed a shot of bravery.

When it comes to travel, I could go for days and days, writing about it I mean. That much travel, while sounding just as thrilling as Seuss’s quote, would exhaust me. I do it in my imagination though, all the time.

If I had the money and the energy, I’d be off. Sure, I’d always come back to my home, as that’s how travel is most appreciated, but I would not be satisfied to simply stay in one place all my life. I would suffocate in that bubble.

Pop!

***

I long to break out of that. I want to see new places. I have a list, a long, long list. I call it my
Bucket List (the very first blog post I ever wrote),
though that name is well worn with travellers the world over.

***

I thought it the summer my parents left on a road trip out west, through the U.S. and Canada. I came up with my travel blogger title and I was off.

The Insightful Wanderer (@TheIWanderer on Twitter)

It was in me, of course, ever since forever. My grandparents lived in just such a bubble, but they didn’t stay. They left sometimes, though always coming home again.

My most favourite treasure from my grandmother are the journals she kept, for years, where she jotted down the daily events of her life and family. Then, just a short distance from where she kept those, were the stakcs of photo albums, full of photographic evidence of the places her and my grandfather saw during their fifty five years together: all throughout Canada and the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean, and Australia.

Life and reality are just as important as a life of travel. Some can avoid that, I suppose, but not me.

I have limitations. I fully acknowledge those, but recently I challenged them too.

***

I immediately started thinking about what I would write, upon reading this week’s prompt for
Finish the Sentence Friday
and my first thought was Mexico.

I would write about my recent trip there. Why not? What else could I possibly write about now, while the memories are fresh? But wait…

I have things I want to say, but I can’t get back to it, whether in my own head or when trying to explain to others just why that trip meant so much. I try and try and try to explain the feeling, but somehow, my experience doesn’t come through. I feel unsatisfied with how I am describing it and how they are hearing it described by me. I guess the expression “you had to be there” is right. Oh, so right.

I travel back to every moment of that week, from my fear and intense anticipation. To my sense of peace and calm and rightness with the world and my place in it at that instant. I don’t want to say words now fail me, but perhaps they do. The envelope of photos I now carry in my purse of my trip don’t do the thing justice either, somehow locked in the past of the actual purse I carried with me. Nor does the bracelet I wear on my left wrist, every bead carrying that week’s sense memories within.

***

I went so far as to create a whole travel website, separate from this blog, while the force was still strong to attempt the world of the travel blogger. I had it all mapped out, saw things so clearly in my mind.

I wrote up an About Me page there, before the new site went live. It laid out all my most favourite spots: Niagara Falls and Ireland.

I put forth an illustrated list of the places I’ve been so far: Cuba, Florida/New York/Michigan/D.C./California, and Germany.

I spelled out everywhere I dreamt of going: Hawaii, Palau, Australia, and New Zealand. I wanted to be adventurous, surprising even myself, and in this dream I stood at the bottom of the world, surrounded by ice and penguins.

I didn’t truly believe I’d have the stamina, resources, or opportunity to make it that far, but, really, who could say?

Then, my website fizzled out. I let myself down. I studied travel blogs galore and somehow, I couldn’t become them, social media and pitching tour companies and all. I couldn’t. I was not a list maker and a personality so strong. My fantasy of becoming someone, I perhaps wasn’t meant to be.

I am a literary writer. That’s who I am. I can take all the travel blog success courses I want, have as many Skype sessions with an already established travel blogger as are offered in any given online course, and I still failed.

***

But I didn’t. I found a way to travel anyways. I found a group of my people, other literary type writers, somewhere full of magic and reality, all wrapped into one.

I couldn’t hold onto that week forever. It came and went. I may feel a little aimless since then, since arriving home, but that’s okay.

The world is a giant place. Anyone who doesn’t open their mind first, it doesn’t matter how far or how nearby they go or stay.

Travel all sorts of places, in your mind, through reading/watching a good book or movie. That’s just more ways to open your mind to the vistas (boy do I love that word).

Read travel blogs, as I still do, if that makes it all more real.

Acknowledge your limitations while challenging what still might be.

Meet people. Meander through a place. Taste a new food or sample a helping of another culture, far flung from your own.

***

I may not have that beautiful travel site I saw in my mind, but I am still wandering through this big, beautiful world and I am doing it with all the insight I can manage to unearth as I go.

I will linger here a bit yet still, but I know I will be off again, sooner or later. If you linger too long, you risk getting stuck. I hate to burst your bubble, but it must be done.

I meander and linger and meander some more. I look over those vistas I can no longer see. I meander with these words and with myself. Still figuring it all out.

I’ll be sure to let you know, here, when I’ve been everywhere. In the meantime, Dr. Seuss’s words keep me going, moving, living.

You Are My Sunshine

You know those cinnamon hearts so common for Valentine’s Day?

He carried a clear plastic heart, but instead of filling it with candy, he placed inside the heart a picture of her – his dear wife of fifty-five years.

He had the words of the song written out on a piece of paper inside with her picture.

You Are My Sunshine

She was taken from him, suddenly, as is often the case.

He lost his sunshine and I lost my grandmother.

How can I make it possible, even through my precious words, for someone to understand just how special she was?

I had dealt with death, more than once, but I felt entirely unprepared for it when it came around again.

She has been gone for ten years and I wish I could tell her about my life since that day she had to go.

The Ties That Bind

I didn’t get to say goodbye. I just figured I would visit her the next day, either in hospital or out. It never really occurred to me that she would never come home again.

I heard my mom on the phone and I heard the news. I would not be visiting her in the hospital the next day.

My cousin stopped in on his lunch hour, as he worked nearby, and was speaking to her. My uncle and grandpa stood beside the bed. My cousin looked away for one second and when he looked back at her, she was silent and would not speak another word. He said her name, but she was gone.

I knew it wasn’t good news. I laid down on my bed and let the tears fall onto my pillow, unconcerned with the business of wiping them away. What was I going to do without her?

Her last diary entry

***

Thur. 21 32 degrees low 19
Telephone repair man here at 5 o’clock. Phone out since Sat morning, July 16th.
Caned 1 jar pickles..

Wed. 20 31 degrees low 20
I got pictures developed. Janet took of our 55th Ann. (tried out new canon camera)

Tues. 19 33 degrees low 21
I washed 2 loads. My right big tow sore. We rested in afternoon. I using Myoflex on arms & legs. It relieves pain.

Mon. 18 32 degrees low 22
Dad picked first pickles. All big. I cut some up 5 jars caned.
I phoned Connie at Dr.’s . She has to make an app for 2-D-Echo Cardiogram for me.
Craig came at nit to say Good-bye. He leaving to go to camp tomorrow till school starts, at Lions Head.

***

She kept a diary, as she called it, on her own terms. She did it her own way. I admired that about her.

I sat in their bedroom, with a cousin and we discussed our memories, and I wondered if my uncles or cousins might have any objections with me keeping her diaries. I certainly could not read the entries, but I wanted this one part of her, her memories and her words, even as I was being forced to let go of the rest.

I wanted to write the tribute to her. I wanted to be the one to read it at her funeral. I worked hard at what I wanted to say about her, writing it out and printing it out in braille, so I could take the words up there with me. I wasn’t going to draw a blank.

The three of us went up to the microphone. It was me, my sister, and my cousin. If I got choked up, my sister could take over. Our cousin was a back-up, just in case she too could not speak. I broke down a few times throughout, but after taking a few seconds to recover myself, I got through it. My usual issue with being unable to speak when I cried did not seem to be happening now.

As we stood at her grave, her sisters gave me flowers. I wanted to put my copy of the tribute, in braille, with her in the casket. I hoped my words were enough to show what she had brought to my life.

She was truly the only one who understood. She fussed over me when I was in pain because she knew my pain better than most. She had lived with her own pain since her children were young.

Many people didn’t understand it and she felt alone. I felt alone too. Together, we weren’t alone anymore. I feel alone sometimes because she is now gone.

I’ve lost something, an innocence not from childhood, but from her presence in my life. I miss it and I miss her.

I miss her singing.

She had a sweet naive quality about her, instilled from her upbringing in the tiny corner of the world she’d always lived in, but her many travels (Alaska, Hawaii, Europe, Australia) were just as important to the two of them. I love travel because of all the times I hoped she would sneak me along in one of their suitcases.

She loved Niagara Falls and she taught me to love it too.

Finally, we would go to Cuba together. She loved Varadero. She loved to watch the people in the hotel’s open-air lobby. She loved to stroll the town, not remaining in the resort the whole time. She loved to meet the people and to speak with them. Her open, friendly nature made other people feel at ease. She wasn’t afraid to try new things, no matter how old she got.

All the times we would stay awake long into the early morning. We would talk and before we knew it, it would be late. My grandpa could be heard snoring from the couch in the family room or in the spare bedroom across the hall. He could sleep for hours. She didn’t sleep well, for years, from pain and other things. I think she enjoyed having someone to talk to.

She said it so sincerely. She said she knew, somewhere out there, one day there would be the right man for me, someone who would take care of and love me for me. I believed her then.

Sometimes – I don’t know if I believe her anymore. I feel like I let her down, as her words and the reassurance in her voice once felt like the greatest comfort, but of which I can no longer hear.

I have only a far off impression of her telling me that, back at the back of my brain and it feels like the confidence in her statement, which she sounded so certain of that night, well I hold onto her and her words of love and comfort and I cling to that purity of hope she had, the sort of positive and optimistic nature she passed on to my mother.

I have my mother still and for that I am blessed because she continues to offer hope.

All I learned about love from my grandma is still in there somewhere.

It feels like more of a rarity now, with all the modern conveniences and technologies, whether that’s actually the truth I don’t know. I hope it isn’t.

But love, like the sort she and my grandpa had in each other, that must be proceeded by hope.

Love. Marriage. I stopped pretending those weren’t things I wanted, like having a bucket of cold water dumped, suddenly, over my head.

It’s something to hope for…something, worth risking failure for.

No matter how painful those failures may be.

I don’t know if what they had, the kind of love and connection, if that really even exists anymore. It’s rare, I know that much. It existed in a time long gone now, as fast-paced as things move these days. It’s a vanishing world of which they lived.

I often feel stuck between the beliefs she had, the religious woman of faith she was, and all she used to tell me and the modern world I live in. I sometimes don’t know what to believe, what I believe, but having her inside me somewhere, I know I follow my heart.

His heart was all wrapped up in her. When she went first, he would carry her photo in that Valentine’s Day heart, and for five more years he lived. She was his heart and he was hers, and now I think I will go visit their graves because writing this isn’t getting me to where I’d hoped.

Ruby Red

Without her here to read what I write, I can’t quite get over these last ten years she’s been gone.

After the funeral and all the family gatherings stopped, a stillness and a silence fell over my mother and me in the kitchen, as we wondered where to go from there. What to do now, without her?

Ten years, flying by like nothing now. I wish I could feel like she’s not really gone, as long as I remember her and write about her.

I need to hear her in myself when I clear my throat. I need to recognize my own naivete, of which I got from her. I need to run my hands over her diary and feel the indentation of her hand writing on the pages within.

Since I began my blog and knew this anniversary was coming, I started wanting the day to get here for me to write, assuming I would write a ten year tribute, building on the one I wrote the day we said goodbye, but I guess it’s something different. It’s everything I’ve thought about her and the things I’ve learned since losing her.

It always comes back to the two of them, for me, and the life they shared for more than fifty years. I wanted to find someone I could love like they loved each other. That was all fifteen-year-old me really wanted.

She was a warm woman and a bright light to all who loved her.
Ruby Witzel, 1929-2005

Blind Bonus

Discrimination is not uncommon with disabilities. I try not to focus on it, but it can happen.

I wrote about my handful of experiences with this in last week’s Memoir Monday post:

Discrimination Happens.

This week’s post, I hope, will be a lot more fun and lighthearted.

And now – the story of a little something my family and I have coined “The Blind Bonus”.

***

Q: Have you experienced preferential treatment because of disabilities?

A: This will be a lighthearted post, as I say, although, for me, the line between having a sense of humour about these things and feeling sensitive is tricky for me.

In my family, with my brother and I both being blind, we have our inside jokes. He is much more easy-going than I am when it comes to it all. I want to be normal, just like everyone else, but I work and hope for equality, which all takes time.

This can be a tricky balance to achieve.

Until then I can say sometimes I grow tired of looking at my life and striving to fit in as an ongoing battle and I let down my guard and look for the humour.

Preferential treatment, as is worded in the above question, is an interesting way of putting it. I suppose, at times, you could say that I have received things others did not, from people I know and from strangers alike.

This brings to the forefront the notion of pity. If someone pities me, even with the best of intentions, it’s because they feel badly for “the poor little blind girl”.

I used to think this in my head. My grandparents were good examples of this.

They knew me and loved me, but they did feel bad that I got such a lousy lot in life, to be born blind. Because of these feelings, because they loved me, I sometimes received material things or special treatment.

This is how it goes for a lot of things in life. Life is not fair and we’ve all experienced that firsthand, at one time or another.

My oma may have cut me some slack in ways she did not others. She could be critical at times, as she got older especially, but I was always her precious little granddaughter. She rarely, if ever, criticized me like she did others.

My grandmother was the nicest woman you could ever find, but pity is one way of looking at the preferential treatment she sometimes showed toward me.

My grandparents had twenty-one grandchildren and they loved us all equally, but they did feel like we had it harder and wanted to do what they could to make our lives just a little bit easier and happier.

For example, they took us all on a night away to Niagara Falls, spread out in groups of three or four kids at a time over the years. All the others only got to go once, but they took my brother and I twice.

They used to bring a little keychain or other small souvenir for each of us with every vacation they took, but as the years went by and more and more grandchildren came along they didn’t keep that up.

Understandable, right? Who could blame them. After all, even the smallest of souvenirs can take up practically an entire suitcase when bringing back twenty-one of something.

However, I have several dolphin and whale sculptures that they brought back for me from the last few tropical locales they traveled to. They did not do this for everyone else.

My mother once confronted hers about this, saying they really did not need to bring me anything. My grandmother’s response had something to do with how she knew they didn’t, but she really just wanted to bring me something anyway.

I don’t say this here to tattle on my beloved grandparents, who are both gone now, or my evil mother for spoiling any chances I had of receiving anymore special presents.

🙂

I say it just because I know, again that life isn’t fair, and so did they.

My mother wanted to prevent any possible jealousy between me and any other siblings or cousins, if they were to find out and because she knew I didn’t need those things when none of the other kids got them.

Also, my mother has always done her best to treat my brother and I the same as her other two children and she worked hard to teach us that we were really no different. This is the best gift anyone could have ever given me.

As for my grandparents – I always knew they loved me, in all the ways they felt it or showed it, and I know how hard it was for them to see me dealing with some of the extra things that I did, fair or not.

Then there were the “blind bonuses” my brother and I received, say, during our trip to Cuba.

We went for a week, with parents and two grandparents.

By the end of the week I’d received a doll from a Cuban woman and a rose made out of a napkin, from a Cuban man as we sat listening to live music near the resort.

Of course it’s hard to know their true motivation, due to the language barrier, but these are only a few examples of what I’m talking about.

In this case, the term preferential treatment, to me it means someone feeling badly for me being blind and either offering me something or giving me something they wouldn’t normally give.

It’s difficult sometimes. On the one hand I strive to show the world around me that I can do most anything else anyone can do and that I want to be treated the same.

On the other, I occasionally need things to be modified so that I can keep up.

In school I would get extra time to do tests and assignments, because sometimes I required specialized equipment or technology. These things often took longer. My teachers, for the most part, understood this and did their best to accommodate.

Then, how did I ever expect to convince the world that I can fit in and contribute?

I’ve never wanted to be treated differently, good or bad. However, at certain moments I resign myself to the unfairness of life. It’s at times like these that I tell myself I miss out on so much and struggle enough that if I sometimes get breaks others do not: so what?

A “blind bonus” is alliteration at its best and I love me some good alliteration.

🙂

Sometimes I probably think I am getting this when I am not (all in my head) and other times it is blatantly obvious to anyone.

***

Next week’s question:

In what other ways are your interpersonal relationships affected by disabilities?

Note: I have been blogging for exactly one year and I am thrilled to be doing just that, involved in such projects as the

Redefining Disability Awareness Challenge

and I still have many more questions to go on it.

I am honoured to be able to use a vehicle like blogging to speak on the issues raised in this extensive set of questions that Rose has put together.

Hemingway’s Havana

THIS DAY IN LITERATURe:
Born – July 21, 1899
died – July 2, 1961

On the trip I took to Cuba several years back I found myself in the famous city of Havana. A van was rented and a driver brought my parents, my brother, and myself to tour around for the day.

A huge part of this tour revolved around infamous American novelist Ernest Hemingway and the spots he frequented while he made his home there in the thirties and beyond.

I must admit I have never been a huge fan of his novels. I started to read The Sun Also Rises a long time ago and I didn’t make it very far. I found his writing a little too cold, distant, and lacking emotion. Perhaps I am too stereotypically a female reader, liking what women apparently look for in a well-written narrative, or else I just didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I was a teenager and I couldn’t escape or deny the boredom. Did Hemingway write more for men? That, supposedly, is a question for another post and time. (Clears throat) Anyway…where was I?

Oh yes…

Anyway, our tour featured some of the places he made famous, for tourists and locals alike. Being a lover of literature as a whole I was curious.

We stopped, at one of the bars he drank at, to have a sample of the drink he made famous: the mojito. I can’t say that this was my sort of drink either, but my mom was excited. I was excited to see our next stop on the tour.

We rode up in the open-air elevator with its screen, to check out the place where he lived and wrote. The Ambos Mundos hotel is visited by travellers from all over the world, every single day. I pictured him sitting there and writing.

“It is said that if a visitor stays in this hotel he or she will surely dream of the characters in Hemingway’s novels.”

I couldn’t deny that I felt brought back in time, in history to his life in that marvelous Cuban city, so full of inspiration.

The small room where he used to stay is obviously a museum now (Number 511) and it is there where it is said he was inspired to write For Whom the Bell Tolls. I haven’t got to that one yet.

Recently I tried once more; second time is a charm? I started reading The Old Man and the Sea and I got out on the open water with the old man and then put the book down, not to pick it up again. I hope to return to this story to complete it at some point.

I thought today, in remembrance of Hemingway and the fact that it would be his birthday if still alive, that I could share my one-and-only Ernest Hemingway related travel experience. Tomorrow is Tuesday and I often post about travel. Cuba was a special place and I hope to write more about the rest of my week on the island on a later Travel Tuesday. I will have to return to Havana one of these days to be able to not waste the opportunity to write about such a famous location and maybe even to visit his home there (Finca La Vigia), which is currently being restored. Now that I have this blog there are so many literary travel spots I need to visit and revisit so I can write about them and give them the appropriate attention they deserve.

Happy Birthday to a legend of a literary mind.

Note: I took a few of the details I was unaware of from this interesting post from a new travel writing site I just discovered.

Traveling Tales online travel magazine

Also: it appears that even if I could be headed for Crazy Cat Lady status, Hemingway was quite the cat lover himself. I can’t tell you what a huge comfort this is.

“Hemingway named all his cats after famous people so we follow that same tradition today. Cats are capable of learning and responding to their names, particularly if they have an affectionate relationship with the person who calls them.)

Hemingway and Kijewski

It’s amazing the sorts of things you find out when you bother doing just a little bit of research.