flying to nyc from the uk again.
when i was growing up we were very poor, so air travel was something
that happened maybe every 5 years or so, and only then when one
of my grandparents was paying.
growing up in connecticut i remember having a relatively wealthy girlfriend when i was 19. she
flew back and forth to france and california a lot, and i remember being
sorely envious of the fact that she flew on planes at least 2 or 3 times a year, which seemed like obscene excess to me at the time.
i was picking her up at the airport one time and i was amazed
that it was 5pm and she was in new york, but that earlier in the day she’d
been in paris.
it seemed like a magic trick, and even though i understood the idea and logistics of international
jet travel i was still kind of baffled by the fact that someone could start the day
on one continent and finish the day on a completely different continent.
it almost seemed like a form of alchemy, turning humans into sub-atomic particles and shuttling them across thousands of miles during the same 12 hour period.
and now i’m a jaded world traveller.
i’m ashamed to say that(the jaded part), but it’s true. and i’m not looking for sympathy or understanding, for
who in their right mind would extend sympathy to a guy who travels around the world
and gets to play music?
if i worked at arby’s cleaning the grease traps i’d be looking for sympathy.
but i’m not deserving of sympathy, nor am i looking for it.
i’m just commenting on how odd it is that when i was growing up i saw international travel
and airports and hotels and airplanes and other languages and other countries as being
inherently and unspeakably glamorous.
sort of like when homer wins a trip for the family to any of the 48 states. marge doesn’t
want to go, and homer says, basically, ‘i want to watch the news on a different channel,
i’m tired of foot long sandwiches, i want to eat hoagies and subs and heroes. why won’t
you let me live, marge?’
that’s sort of how i felt when i was growing up, that channel 2 news in connecticut was mundane, but channel 6 news
in sacramento was glamorous. or to watch tv news in the uk? or france? unspeakably glamorous,
almost terrifyingly glamorous.
i remember my first trip to france(my first trip to europe). it was 1987 and my girlfriend at the time
and i were going to live in paris for the summer.
i was excited for about a year beforehand. i got a bunch of french stickers and put them on
common things around the house(‘fenetre’, ‘toillette’, etc). and when we finally got to paris
i had panic attacks because everything was so different and so foreign and i had never left
the united states and i was convinced that i would be found out as a hayseed/rube/hick from the u.s and a. i remember seeing the champs-elysees the morning we arrived
and i couldn’t believe how foreign and ancient and terrifying it seemed.
once the panic abated the champs-elysees no longer seemed foreign and ancient and terrifying, but
at first it was the embodiement of everything i hadn’t grown up with, not to mention everything that seemed wealthier and more sophisticated and older and deeper and more interesting than anything i’d ever had access to.
the champs-elysees(and all of paris) seemed like the worlds most sophisticated club, and i was just some dirty pissant american there to sully it with my ignorant provincialism.
the irony in all of this was that i spent a lot of my childhood in manhattan in the 70’s and 80’s.
and manhattan in the 70’s and 80’s was truly dangerous and truly terrifying. but the danger
and terror of manhattan were familiar entities, whereas the newness and foreignness
of france(or the uk, or germany, my 2nd and 3rd trips out of the country)were terrifying in
their unfamiliarity.
and now i’m a jaded world traveller. maybe ‘jaded’ is the wrong word. i still love
certain things about travelling. i’m still in awe when i see paris in the morning, at how beautiful
it is.
i’m still amazed when i look up at edinburgh castle and arthur’s seat.
i’m still amazed by gigantic mountains and thunderstorms from 35,000 feet and dinosaur sized bats in australia and the hermitage and rome and etc and etc.
travel can still stun me with it’s beauty, but rarely with it’s foreign-ness.
and now you’re wondering, if you’ve read this far, what i’m leading to.
and i’m sorry to disappoint you, but i’m not leading to anything.
i’m just commenting(to myself, at this point, i’m guessing)on how strange it is to be a fairly
jaded world-traveller who once was a terrified, provincial, and poverty stricken kid from connecticut.
it’s a weird dichotomy, and i still haven’t made sense of it, even after 18 years of fairly constant
travel.
ok, that’s it. time to go be a jaded traveller and drink o.j and read a f. paul wilson book and watch ’30 rock’ while flying past reykjavik.
thanks for listening.
moby
