Open Road

"Gardner McKay is dead?'' My sister sounded as shocked as I had been when I found the actor's obit on Wikipedia.

"Not just dead,'' I said to her. ''Dead for a long time."

McKay had died in November 2001, aged 69, and my sister and I both felt bad that we hadn't somehow known it at the time: That's how important he'd been to us when we were growing up.

The reason was "Adventures in Paradise,'' a television show that ran between 1959 and 1962. Gardner McKay was its hero.

He played Adam Troy, captain of the Tiki, a two-masted white schooner that sailed the South Pacific, carrying cargo and passengers between the islands - a different island every week, and a different plot. It was the waterborne version of "Route 66,'' and it was part of the reason I became a traveler.

Like many teenaged girls, my sister had had a crush on the actor, one of the handsomest men on any screen, TV, or movie, then or now. I, perhaps predictably, had a crush on the schooner.

Last winter, I fell in love with the Tiki all over again - and with the whole idea of plying the South Seas, going wherever the wind would take you - because last winter I couldn't go anywhere at all.

I'd broken my foot on a trip to Cuba and was stuck in a cast for all of February and March, while sympathetic friends brought me groceries, and kind neighbors walked my dogs on icy days. Indoors, I moped.

To cheer me up, my best friend tracked down all available "Adventures in Paradise'' episodes on DVD - 65 episodes, each an hour long. I watched them all, and in the process reverted to being 14 years old again.

The series ran before educational TV, before the Travel Channel, before the Internet, and longer still before good travel websites.

Surprisingly, it taught: Each episode opened with a map of the South Pacific, then zeroed in on that week's island group. "So that's why I knew where Suva was!'' I thought, watching Episode Three.

That's also how I must have learned that Pago Pago is pronounced Pango Pango, that Papeete is the capital of Tahiti, and that the word "propinquity'' - a turning point in one episode - means ''nearness.'' Strange to remember that, since I cared so much more about "far.''

I'd wanted to run away to sea for years, inspired by a square-rigged ship model my father had made when he was a boy - a replica of the famous Flying Cloud, a clipper ship so fast that its record time around the Horn wasn't broken till 1989.

About two dozen episodes into my nostalgic TV marathon, I realized that while it was getting pretty late to run away to sea, I could at least write to the former star and thank him for the influence "Adventures in Paradise'' had had on my life.

But it was too late. Gardner McKay was already gone. If only I'd acted sooner, I thought, we might have had an interesting conversation. We could even have talked about the Flying Cloud: McKay's great-great-grandfather designed the original clipper.

With that heritage, McKay had grown up sailing off the coast of New England, a background that actually helped him get his TV role, a fan website said: The show's producers wanted a lead who could actually sail.

But his real adventures began only after "Adventures in Paradise'' went off the air.

McKay headed for the Amazon, spent a couple of years traveling in South America and then began building a professional future as a writer in three genres - playwright, novelist and journalist.

A rather successful future, at that: Gardner McKay won three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for playwriting; saw his plays produced all over the country; taught university-level writing classes at UCLA, the University of Alaska and the University of Hawaii; was a drama critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser, had a regular weekly show on Hawaii Public Radio and was working on a memoir at the time of his death.

At different points, he also took a turn at sculpture, became a painter and was, before his TV fame, briefly known as an international photographer: He was a passenger on the French liner Ile de France when it rescued survivors of the 1956 sinking of the Andrea Doria; McKay's photographs of the event received world-wide play.

He also managed to live all over the world: Manhattan, Paris, Ireland, Brazil, Egypt, Venezuela, the West Indies, Connecticut, California and finally Hawaii, where he died.

I passed all this on to my sister.

"He had a LIFE,'' she said thoughtfully.

Yes, I said, he certainly did. He'd reinvented himself at every step of the way.

Reinvention was hardly the word for what I was doing. I was regressing. Even rationing out the episodes, I couldn't make "Adventures in Paradise'' last all winter. My foot was still in its cast when I finished the last DVD, and I felt as stuck as I had been when I was 14.

Even my journal entries now sounded like a 14-year-old's. It was as if time hadn't passed. As if I hadn't grown up. As if I hadn't spent most of my adult life as a travel writer.

"I wish I could do that,'' I'd written sorrowfully one day, as the Tiki sailed off into the watery distance yet again.

The idiocy of that lament finally snapped me back to adulthood: "You KNOW how to do that,'' I told myself. "Just pick up the phone!''

And I did. I called a Minnesota-based volunteer organization, found out that they still ran a program in the South Pacific and signed up to work on Rarotonga this winter. I had to smile at that: Rarotonga was another place whose name I first heard on "Adventures in Paradise.''

Posted by learninglife at 6:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new movie, out this month, charts the life of the late French fashion designer Coco Chanel. It's a story of ambition, talent, perseverance and, more than anything, constant self-redefinition.

By coincidence, I've been pondering that last subject all summer, thanks to a larger French context: The city of Paris itself.

Why, I've wondered, should personal reinvention be such a high hurdle for so many people, me included? Cities - even those as seemingly immutable as Paris - do it all the time: The more they change, as the old French saying goes, the more they stay the same.

I was reminded of that on a flight from Minneapolis to Paris in late June, thanks to a group of Minnesota college students who practically effervesced as they boarded the plane. One of the girls sat next to me; half a dozen more were seated around us.

What were they going to be doing? I wondered.

"We are spending a month studying French language and culture at the Sorbonne,'' my seatmate told me.

Wow, I said, mentally back in the Paris I'd first seen at about their age, on my way home from a Minnesota SPAN program in the Middle East. The youth-thronged streets of the Left Bank were as vivid in memory as they had been in 1963, and I was just as envious now as I had been then of students who could simply stay on - at the Sorbonne.

The memory made me a little sad, not for the passing of time, but for the fact that these kids wouldn't - couldn't - experience the Paris I saw on that first visit. It would have changed too much....

Just then - mercifully before I could slide deeper into negative nostalgia - the flight attendants closed the cabin doors and began the usual announcements. I didn't pay much attention until a deep male voice took over.

"Bienvenue,'' he began, in what was clearly his native tongue. The French syllables rolled elegantly off his lips, evoking candlelight and champagne, making "overhead bins'' and "buckle your seat belt'' sound magically romantic.

As he spoke, one of the young students ahead of me turned around and gave her companions a triumphant smile. It refuted everything I'd been thinking.

"See?'' her look said, "This is real! They really talk that way! We are REALLY going!''

Of course she was right: This was real, and when they got off the plane, they would find - not my Paris - but their Paris, and it would be just as foreign and exciting and real as mine had been for me.

Paris would still be Paris. Would always be Paris. The Eiffel Tower would still be rising above the Seine; the bateaux mouches would still be cruising the river; the square in front of Notre Dame would still be crowded; street mimes would still be, well, miming; the shops would be too expensive, the art great, the croissants fresh. And these young travelers would complain about the high costs the way my friends and I had, and they would be just as enchanted.

Paris IS still Paris. It reinvents itself constantly. The people change, the signage changes, a few tall buildings go up around the edges, and I suppose a few come down somewhere else. But its soul continues. It made me reconsider: If a whole city can do it, then with or without Coco Chanel, we ought to be able to do the same.

Posted by learninglife at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Your quiet mornings are over!'' a man with a coffee cup called cheerily from the sidewalk this morning as I headed out to walk my dogs.

"I know!" I called back. "It always makes me smile!''

This was Day One of a brand-new year for the elementary school at the end of my Minneapolis street. The man with the coffee cup had a small child walking by his side - new shoes, new backpack - part of the parade of parents who will walk their kids past my front door every weekday morning until next June.

Looking down the street, I could see a familiar hubbub around the school building: Bus after orange bus pulling up to disgorge little passengers; a traffic jam in the parking lot as parents jockeyed to get their cars close to the front doors; flashes of light as parents took the annual commemorative photos out on the lawn.

It's definitely fall now, I thought, even if the calendar won't admit that for a few more weeks. But for once I didn't feel the old familiar tug of regret that I have felt every September since I was six.

I always dreaded the first day of school. Even my mother's annual promise of a new plaid skirt or a corduroy jumper couldn't dull the sting. It wasn't that I didn't like school - it was that I hated seeing things end, and school meant the end of summer, the end of freedom.

Because I don't have children of my own, I've kept on looking at it that way - from a childish point of view - until this year, when I saw it for it truly is: A beginning.

What caused this mental shift had nothing to do with the cute little flock of neighborhood kids going by and everything to do with the new beginnings I see more and more adults making all around me. Some are spectacular.

My cousin Mark, for example, left for Australia on August 30. Nothing so unusual about that - airfares are pretty good to that end of the earth right now, lots of people take vacations at the end of summer, Australia is always interesting...

Except this is not a vacation. Mark has gone to take a newly created post at the University of Sydney, which hopes to become a world center for studies of American culture. The university sought him out because of his background in American economic history.

It would be a great position for anyone to land, especially someone whose Ph.D. is only a couple of years old. But what's really unusual isn't my cousin's expertise or his good fortune. It's his age. Mark just turned 60. This is the beginning of his second career.

The month before, closer to home, my sister Jane, the youngest in the family, graduated from Hamline with a Master of Fine Arts in children's literature - a landmark she achieved while selling real estate full-time, managing a household with a teenager still at home and finishing the manuscript of her fourth novel. Now she's hoping to teach. Jane is 52. And this will be at least her third career.

Neither Mark nor Jane went "back'' to school. They went ''forward'' to school. What this says to me is that the first day of school isn't in our pasts unless we want to leave it there. Looked at differently, it could be just around the corner.

Posted by learninglife at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just come back from a class reunion - not the usual high school or college kind, with name tags and dress-up clothes, cocktails and gossip - but a new kind, the lifelong learning kind.

A decade ago, the people at this reunion took a summer writing class together, in the university's Split Rock Arts Program. I was their teacher then. Most teacher-student relationships end, except for persistent goodwill, when the class is over. But this one didn't.

The students - all adults, most of them women - stayed in touch with each other. Those who lived in Minnesota began to meet regularly to share their writing, and they invited me to join them - not as a teacher now, but as a classmate, as a friend.

Soon, someone suggested holding a summer reunion. Every year since, we've gathered at a northwoods cabin for a weekend of catching up on our lives and our writing, with good meals, some beach time, and maybe a visit to a local flea market thrown in. (It IS a summer weekend, after all.)

Over the years, there have been changes in our personal lives, but when it comes to our creative work, change has meant an inward evolution - less a matter of difference than of greater focus, more clarity of intent.

One of the group switched from writing to painting and launched a whole new career for herself. Two have gotten Masters of Fine Arts degrees. Two more have had successful books published. Four of us are officially working on book-length manuscripts - three in memoir, one in poetry - and others are thinking about their own.

At each of our reunions, ideas bubble up. Everyone brings something they've been working on and reads it aloud to the rest. The feedback is solid - useful, reliable, positive. We help each other.

Just how much is always clearest at the end, when it's time for our final reunion tradition - the candle ceremony, a ritual someone suggested when the group was new. It calls for each of us to light a candle and make a wish for the coming year.

Sometimes, the wish is altruistic - for the health of a friend, say, or for a son or daughter about to start college, or for a grown-up child who's moving away.

Usually, though, the wishes are concrete and personal, connected to the work that brought us together in the first place - "that I'll get my manuscript finished'' or "that I'll find a publisher.'' Occasionally, a wish is spectacularly concrete and personal: "I want to be famous! And rich! And on 'Oprah'!''

Whatever the wish, it's always heartfelt. And so is the support. We take every wish seriously. One by one, each of us carefully repeats it, until the wish has traveled around the room, through all of us:

"I hear you wish that you'll get your manuscript finished,'' each of us says, or "I hear you wish for a better job and more time to work on your writing,'' or even "I hear you wish to be famous, rich and on Oprah.''

It's as if each wish were a candle flame - a small bright treasure that we are passing from heart to heart, protecting it as we go.

Hearing your own wish repeated eight or nine or ten times is even more powerful. It makes your wish stick. It makes it sound as if your wish can actually come true.

This year we went around the circle twice, once for each of us present, then around again, making wishes on behalf of others who could not come: a widow, a busy physician, a teacher in Florida, a government staffer in Washington.

Then, when the last wish was done, we just sat still for a moment and quietly looked at each other - at all of the now-familiar faces glowing in candlelight. Each one was smiling.

This is where a lifelong learning class can lead, I thought: Not just to lifelong learning but to lifelong friendships, which are - and deserve credit for being - their own sweet form of lifelong growth and sustenance.

Posted by learninglife at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used to think you had to travel to see exotic wildlife - until last week, anyway, when a bird the size of a bus stopped my car just as I was pulling onto the Ford Bridge.

Okay, it wasn't that big. But it was big. And so exotically out of place that for a split second I thought it might be a peacock.

I hit the brakes, my mind Rolodexing through all the reasons why it couldn't be a peacock ("Too big! Too brown! No tail! This is Minnesota!''). By the time the car stopped, I'd hit the answer, though mercifully not the bird.

It was a wild turkey.

A young, rather slim wild turkey, so unaccustomed to automobiles that it didn't run when my front bumper stopped three feet away. It didn't even flinch - though when cars in the oncoming lanes began closing in, it did stop strolling toward the yellow center line. It paced around in front of my hood instead.

Lots of people, especially in rural areas, see wild turkeys all the time. I know that. But this was in the city - in the middle of a street in my own south Minneapolis neighborhood, a place of bungalows and cottages, neat lawns and boulevard gardens, traffic lights and stop signs - a tame world where a wild turkey was about as foreign as my imaginary peacock.

Urban wildlife here is limited to the raccoon families that emerge at dusk to rob garbage cans, the gray squirrel that chewed the tops off my tulips, the chipmunk who lives in the ivy outside my bedroom window, and a hopeful mallard couple that started to nest beside a puddle in our street - until the puddle dried up.

Even a deer would be a surprise here. A wild turkey was so preposterous that I laughed out loud.

I eased my car toward the bird, very slowly, thinking it might reconsider and sprint back into the safety of Minnehaha Park. No, it just stalked calmly around to the passenger-side window, craned its scrawny pink neck and peered in at me. It looked like a teen-aged ostrich.

I was just wondering whether it would peck the glass - and whether the glass would break if it did - when a young guy leaped out of the nearest car and tried to shoo it away. It didn't want to go. He had to chase the turkey up and down, in between cars, yelling and waving his arms, before it finally changed its mind - and its course - and sprinted off.

"Had one in my yard!'' the guy shouted, as he got back behind the wheel. I drove on, smiling, and thought of other encounters with exotic wildlife. The clump of trees on an East African horizon that materialized into giraffes as we got closer. The log in a Florida backwater that became an alligator and crawled away in the blink of one yellow eye. The dark clump of leaves in a jungle tree in Costa Rica that morphed into a howler monkey breakfasting on blossoms.

Those were exotic surprises, all right, but they'd all been in exotic places. Because home isn't exotic, I don't expect wild turkeys here, anymore than I expect peacocks. So I don't look for them.

Familiarity, I realized, doesn't breed contempt - it just breeds familiarity. That wild turkey literally made me open my eyes.

It also made me remember an old family friend, whose attitude toward life deserves to be passed along. Every day, he said, he tried to find a new way to drive to work because he "never knew what he might see.'' He'd have loved that wild turkey. So did I - for showing me that home can be exotic, too.

Posted by learninglife at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’d gone out to “the pyramids’’ – that’s all you need to say in Mexico City to identify the vast ruins of Teotihuacan, northeast of town – and had spent all day there, my friend Mary Ann and I.

Afterward, heading back to our hotel by bus, we were stuck in heavy afternoon traffic, just where the highway comes over a ridge and starts down into the smoggy bowl that holds the capital. The delay gave me time to remember, not that I hadn’t been doing it all day.

“Vast’’ is a pretty weak adjective for Teotihuacan [tay-oh-ti-hwa-KAN]. At its peak, about 600 A.D., this city had as many as 200,000 people, and it influenced art, architecture and culture all over Central America for something like 1,000 years. Its greatest monument still stands, undiminished – the mountain-like Pyramid of the Sun, third largest pyramid in the world.

But it wasn’t the ancient past that was on my mind as Mary Ann and I walked up the wide, pyramid-flanked Avenue of the Dead, under a blazing sun. I was thinking about a personal past – eye-blink recent in Teotihuacan’s terms but distant in my own.

I had been here once before, 40 years earlier, with my parents and younger siblings on the longest – and last – of our long summer camping trips. We called it “The Big Ruin Trip,’’ and by the time we got to Teotihuacan, we were veterans of La Venta and El Tajin in the state of Veracruz, Mitla outside Oaxaca, Palenque in Chiapas, and Chichen Itza and Uxmal in Yucatan.

Seeing Teotihuacan again last winter brought that vanished trip back to me – who we’d all been back then, how much we saw and learned, how we’d all been happier on trips than we ever managed to be at home. Small wonder that I chose travel as a career.

Now, with the traffic around our bus gridlocked in both directions – four lanes of suburbanites heading home, four lanes of city dwellers heading in – I was experiencing one of travel’s downsides.

“I wouldn’t drive in that on a bet,’’ I was just thinking, when a sudden jolt of insight struck. It was one of those moments when the kaleidoscope of memory twists, and all the familiar colored chips fall into a pattern you never saw before.

No, I thought, I wouldn’t risk driving in this – but my father had! And in situations far more dangerous. I’d seen him do it – at night, on unmarked dirt roads, in warrens of back streets, through jungles, in strange cities – for thousands of miles, all over Mexico.

I’d never thought of him as a risk-taker, but now I saw that he’d risked the entire family for the sake of – what? Curiosity, surely, but also for the challenge of it – to see how far we could get, into what scrapes we might drive, and still get out okay. He’d done it too. He’d gotten us all home safe again. Every time. Nobody even got sick.

And I’d taken it all for granted. Long trips were just something our family did. I grew up thinking they were normal. Only now, on this bus in a Mexican traffic jam, did I see how remarkable they’d been.

Once, decades after the family camper had been sold and a long trip for my aging parents meant going no farther than Brainerd, my father and I had an argument – one of our many – about what I did for a living. It was on the eve of one of my trips, which one and where, I don’t remember – just his words:

What is wrong with you? he growled. What’s wrong with staying home? It had been good enough for him – the same city, the same job all his adult life. Who taught you to travel like that, anyway?

If he hadn’t looked so genuinely baffled and angry, I’d have thought he was kidding. As it was, I just shrugged and dodged the question.

If I’d understood then what Teotihuacan revealed to me this winter, I’d have told him what he must have been hoping to hear. There’s no way to do that now – he’s been dead for 20 years – but if I could do it over, I’d say this: You did, Dad. You taught me to travel. Thank you for giving me the world.

Posted by learninglife at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Glasgow, Scotland, is a great city, made greater by the urban revival that brought glass-and-steel buildings into once-gloomy neighborhoods and failing shipyards. But in late fall and pouring rain, Glasgow last year made me crave less architecture and more hot tea, preferably with a little brandy, next to a cozy fireplace.

Back at our hotel, one of my traveling companions – a fellow Minnesotan whom I’d known since we were freshman at the U of M – had done a little research. “There’s a Joan Baez concert tonight,’’ he informed me.

I gasped – Joan Baez, of all people! In Glasgow for this one night only! The coincidence stunned me. She had been my favorite singer in college, and I still have all her records – four-decade-old LPs in brittle pasteboard jackets – even though I no longer have a stereo to play them on.

I never got to hear Baez in person and eventually forgot how much I’d wanted to. Till now. “Wanna go?’’ I asked my friend.

“No,’’ he said diffidently, “I saw her and Dylan at The Scholar when I was 18,’’ and went back to writing postcards.

I remembered The Scholar. It was Dinkytown’s version of a Greenwich Village hangout: black walls, non-existent lighting, fishnets strung dramatically overhead, little tables with candles, and a lot of clean-cut college boys and girls in the tidy uniforms of the day – madras plaids, oxford-cloth button-downs, crewcuts, bouffants, hair-sprayed flips.

I don’t remember what I heard there, but it sure wasn’t Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Now in Glasgow, I went alone. There were still tickets left at the city’s new Royal Concert Hall – $70 apiece at that week’s exchange rate, but for me, an easy decision.

I got there half an hour early and filled the time people-watching. Strange, how much alike everyone looked – the whole audience seemed to have gray hair and wrinkles. Some folks used canes; others limped; some leaned on each other for support or, in rare cases, on the arm of what had to be a middle-aged child or, even rarer, a grandchild.

I didn’t catch on till the warm-up music started – recordings of famous American songs straight from the 1950s and ‘60s – and I knew all the words. Just like everybody around me. If age is a country, I thought, these are my fellow citizens.

Joan Baez was the only one who didn’t look old. “It’s been 50 years, folks,’’ she said, stepping up to the microphone.

She was as graceful and elfin as ever, though her trademark hair – once a waist-length, jet-black curtain – was now salt-and-pepper, cut very short. Time had dulled her tone when she spoke, and her once-liquid upper ranges were gone when she sang. But on lower notes, her voice was still strong and rich; her words still carried powerful messages of peace and protest, and she still brought tears to my eyes.

What touched me most, though, wasn’t her old classics like “We’ll go no more a-roving’’ or “I had a dog, and his name was Blue.....’’ or even my favorite, “There but for Fortune go you and I, you and I ....’’
It was just a gray-headed man on the main floor, overcome with emotion, who suddenly leaped to his feet, held out his arms toward her and, in a deep, raspy voice exactly like Sean Connery’s, shouted out this one passionate sentence:

“I spent most o’ my life lovin’ you!’’

The audience burst into sympathetic applause, and Baez blew him kisses before she turned back to her music.

Maybe that’s the lesson of this unexpected concert: Sometimes life gives you a second chance to tell someone you loved what you didn’t or couldn’t say before. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, maybe we all get to hear Joan Baez sing in Glasgow.

Posted by learninglife at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was 5 a.m., pitch dark on a bitter morning at the end of December, and I was out in my bulky winter coat, walking my dogs among the snowdrifts. And cursing.

Cursing because I had been up until 2 a.m., packing for a trip to Mexico City, and I still wasn’t ready, and my traveling companion Mary Ann was picking me up in 20 minutes.

Cursing because I kept stumbling on snow clumps and slipping on patches of ice I couldn’t see. Cursing because it was so cold that my fingers hurt. Cursing because there was so maddeningly much winter left to get through.

By 5 p.m. on the same day, I was in Mexico City, starting to relax, with the sense that I’d been holding my breath for months and had finally exhaled.

The weather was as warm as a Minnesota evening in May, and all we needed outside were summer sweaters. After supper, Mary Ann and I strolled a few blocks over to the Zocalo, the capital’s vast central square.

What we found was snow. Real snow. Snow and ice.

We had arrived in the middle of a new celebration called “Winter in the Capital’’ – the city’s second annual winter festival, a gift to the people from the current mayor’s government.

But it never snows in Mexico City, so the city had had to import the winter – along with a huge skating rink, two Zambonis, and some figure-skating stars from Canada. Everything, including rental skates, was free.

The whole Zocalo was crammed with people, mostly families, bundled against weather they thought was cold – adults in heavy cardigans and ski jackets, little kids in puffy parkas with fur-trimmed hoods and clip-on mittens. Vendors wandered among the crowd, selling balloons and noisemakers and glow-in-the-dark trinkets.

In the center of the plaza, flanked by the Cathedral and the National Palace and just as tall, stood a huge Christmas “tree’’ – a lofty cone of blinking white lights – with a kiddie train tootling around its base, full of little passengers.

Two big white plastic tents glowed like giant ice crystals in front of the Cathedral, and people were crowded around, trying to peer inside. One tent held an artificial hill, with little kids taking turns riding down on sleds. The other wore a baffling sign: “Little boy dolls of snow,’’ we read, translating the Spanish literally.

And then inspiration hit: “Snowmen!’’ Mary Ann cried, and sure enough, inside that tent, kids and parents were busily molding snow into fat little figures, adding scarves and stocking caps and carrot noses, then getting their pictures taken with the result.

The real show-stopper, though, was the skating rink. Local news media called it the largest rink in the world, and there was no reason to doubt that: It covered half the Zocalo and held up to 1,500 skaters at a time, with more people lined up outside, waiting to get a turn or to climb up to the mirador – the viewing stand – and watch everyone circling round and round.

The scene was charming. Rookie skaters of all ages clung to the boards, carefully edging around the ice, trying not to fall. The more experienced were cruising counter-clockwise around the big oval, their styles ranging from stately (the adults) to reckless (the teens), with a handful of youngsters practicing spectacular skidding stops worthy of hockey goalies.

Everybody seemed to be smiling, on the ice and off – except for a few tiny kids who didn’t want to go home yet.

I was smiling too. Amazing, how much in life depends on attitude: the very thing that I had been whole-heartedly cursing in the morning was the same thing that everybody here, me included, was whole-heartedly enjoying in the evening.

Mexico City made winter look good, and the glow of it lasted a long time – not all of the three cold months after I got back, I admit, but most of them. There’s a lesson in that.

Posted by learninglife at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend I often travel with has an unusual gift: the ability to tune out when things get tense. Once, on a hair-raising drive through Turkey, when our driver wouldn’t go less than 100 miles an hour and I was white-knuckled with fear, Jim fell asleep. Just blissfully took a nap, while the traffic blurred by around us.

“How could you do that?’’ I asked him later, amazed.

“Nothing else to do,’’ he said mildly.

In other words, he knows how to let go – something my yoga instructor advises before every class. Let go of the tasks on your mental list, let go of the day’s frustrations, let go of your fears, and concentrate only on the present moment.

It’s great advice, but I only manage to do it when I’m trying to twist myself into another position with a Sanskrit name. Or when I’m on a trip. Travel, more than anything I know, demands staying in that good old present moment.

I thought of this in late September, while I was in Scotland, traveling with friends. We’d been mentally off-line for a couple of weeks, as far as news from home was concerned. True, we had heard a few snippets about the economy – the DOW losing 775 points one day, more the next – but it seemed mercifully distant. The news we were really hungry for was about the presidential race.

One evening, in the living room of a snug cottage we’d rented near Loch Ness, we all settled down to watch a late-night re-broadcast of the final presidential debate on BBC-TV. We set out crackers, cheddar and wine and reached for the remote.

But that was the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a 700-billion-pound bailout, essentially nationalizing several major British banks. BBC-TV scrapped the American debate to deal with more pressing economic news on the homefront.

This put my own homefront in perspective – reminding me, as traveling always does, that we Americans are just part of a larger picture, not the center of attention at the world’s party.

A month later, I got another taste of travel-mandated non-involvement. While my fellow Americans prepared to go to the polls, I went to the airport, en route to India for a travel-writing conference. I’d cast my vote for president before I left, knowing I’d be on planes or running through airports from mid-afternoon on November 3 until I arrived in Calcutta at midday on November 5.

I had expected that the pilot of whatever plane I was on would announce the results. Wouldn’t every passenger want to know? Apparently not. Aboard Air India, it was as if the whole watershed event wasn’t taking place at all.

I didn’t know that Barack Obama had been elected until I got to my room, turned on the TV and located an Indian broadcast in English. The station’s self-possessed, beautifully spoken anchorman nearly wept with joy as he announced the new president’s name.

I was sorry I’d missed all the suspense and excitement. But I’d also missed the stress and agony of all that suspense and excitement. Travel had just forced me to do what my friend Jim does naturally: let go. When things are beyond your control, it’s a genuine relief.

Posted by learninglife at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The coming year will be the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, and the celebrations – rightly – will be myriad. But as the list of Lincoln events grows, I keep thinking of a far less celebrated 200th anniversary that took place in 2008. I would never have known about it, let alone cared, if I hadn’t chanced through Greeneville, Tennessee, last spring.

Greeneville, a small city not far from the Great Smokies, was home to the man who became president when Lincoln was assassinated, his vice president, Andrew Johnson. “But he was impeached!’’ I said to the national park ranger at the Johnson home and museum in downtown Greeneville. “How on earth do you honor that?’’

The ranger smiled – he’d heard this question before – and explained that the focus wasn’t on Johnson’s failings but on his challenges: “He stepped into the worst job in the world,’’ the ranger said, and I realized that ever since grade school, I had simply accepted history’s label of the man and never looked beyond it.

The Johnsons themselves knew it was going to be rough. The museum quotes his daughter, Martha, on the family’s move to the White House: “We are plain people from the mountains of Tennessee,’’ she said, “called here for a short time by a national calamity, and trust too much will not be expected of us.’’

In the course of the next hour, as I was guided through Johnson’s tidy red-brick house on a rainy afternoon when I was the only visitor, I heard another Lincoln-esque up-by-the-bootstraps success story: Johnson had been a tailor by trade. Self-educated (wife-educated, really, since she read to him while he stitched). A passionate politician. A U.S. Senator. A strict Constitutionalist. A Southerner who opposed the Confederacy.

But the impeachment? There was never a hint of personal misconduct, the ranger said. It was a bitter dispute with Congress over a constitutional issue. Johnson said the Constitution gave him the right to appoint his own secretary of war; the Congress insisted he had to stick with Lincoln’s. Johnson actually won, acquitted by just one vote in the Senate. Vindication came 50 years after his death, when a Supreme Court ruling in another case supported his view..

After his presidency, Johnson went back to Tennessee and successfully fought to get reelected to the U.S. Senate – the only former president who ever did. When he died in 1875, he was buried, in Greeneville, as he had asked to be: “Wrapped in an American flag,’’ the ranger said, “with his head resting on a copy of the Constitution.’’

When the weather cleared, I drove up to the top of Monument Hill, where an American eagle on a tall column marks Johnson’s grave. I looked out at the sweet, wooded countryside rolling away to in the distance and thought about the difference between human history and human life.

There was so much more to Andrew Johnson than I’d learned in my American history classes. It made me think how much more there is to any of our lives. History hasn’t got time for anybody’s details – too much ground to cover, too much to sum up. It has to be satisfied with labels. Life – for all its seeming brevity – suddenly seemed far more generous.

Posted by learninglife at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“If you fall in love with someone in Paris, then for the rest of your life, you will always know what time it is in Paris.�

I first read that sentence in Look Magazine, forty-some years ago, and I’ve thought of it often since. It’s a sweeter way of saying something that has become so familiar, it’s almost a cliché – the idea that international travel builds bridges across cultures and between people.

I’ve used that idea as a sort of mantra all my life, starting when I was a high-school exchange student. But I don’t think I ever felt it more keenly than I did at the end of November, when terrorists took over the heart of Mumbai.

I had been in India barely two weeks before, attending an academic conference on travel writing at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. I wasn’t in Mumbai, except to change planes in the middle of the night, and I didn’t fall in love in Calcutta. But the trip had given me a new connection with India, and that made the horrific news hit all the harder.

Images from the trip were still in my eyes – the sunlight blazing through the campus trees in the morning; streets so crowded, they felt like traffic jams in motion; the way people thronged the sidewalks and roadsides; how the white bulk of the Victoria Memorial shimmered at twilight. In other words, I now knew what time it was in India.

But the width of the country lies between Mumbai, on the west coast, and Calcutta, on the east, and that distance was reassuring. It let me believe that the people I’d met at the conference were far away and safe. That was, of course, denial: people move around in India the way they do here, and extended families are extended indeed.

When the siege was over, I emailed the professor who had organized the Calcutta conference and told her how sorry I was about the attacks. She emailed back immediately.

“It has been a harrowing time for us all,’’ she wrote. “One of our colleagues in the English Department saw her husband taken hostage for 48 hours in the Oberoi, and two of my cousin’s in-laws were shot dead at the Taj.’’

And suddenly India, with more than a billion people, seemed small and closely knit, and I was stunned at how close terrorism had come to people I knew.

What she wrote next made me remember that old Look Magazine quote, as well as the words of comfort we heard from around the globe after 9/11, and how small that globe has become:

“In times like these,’’ she said, bringing tears to my eyes, “we realize that the world is not made up of nations but of people, people who reach out to others like them who are in pain.’’

Posted by learninglife at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somewhere in the 1970s, a friend gave me a quotation from a book called “The Last Unicorn,’’ by Peter Beagle. I’ve never read the book, but I’ve kept that little quote above my desk ever since. This is what it says:

“I believed...that time was real and solid as myself... I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map; I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.’’

A few cold nights ago, I watched a remarkable neighbor walk through the walls. Technically, she was driving, but it was the same journey: through darkness, into the future. I know her just well enough to be in awe. She had retired early, sold her beloved house and all her possessions, and was setting out with nothing but her small car and some clothes. She plans to go from place to place, staying with friends, taking classes, trying out short-term jobs, volunteering and seeing what happens next.

I envied her that freedom. But wasn’t it hard, I had asked my neighbor, to let go of everything? Yes, she said. Yes, it was very hard. I gazed around my living room then, wondering: Could I live without that orange rug I bought in Turkey? Without that piece of black pottery from Mexico? Without – well, without every thing I’d ever fallen in love with and lugged home from the ends of the earth? I couldn’t imagine it. But if she hadn’t done it, my neighbor explained, if she had just put her stuff in storage, it would have been a subconscious anchor, holding her here, calling her back. It would have meant she wasn’t really committed to changing her life.

I started to ask her when she was coming home, then realized that the question was silly: She’s not. For her, the word “home’’ has lost its relevance. When she drove away that night, I realized I was seeing a person transform herself. It was like watching a butterfly emerge from a tight chrysalis and spread her wings in the world. Most of us can’t or won’t follow suit, but I am grateful for her inspiration.

Posted by learninglife at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Life, it turns out, really IS a journey. The road may be open, but it doesn’t necessarily get smoother the farther you go. In these mini-essays about work, self-worth, travel, and finding meaning, award-winning travel writer Catherine Watson will share some of the bumps, detours, sharp turns and, ultimately, joyful discoveries along the way.

An award-winning writer, editor, and photographer, Catherine was the first travel editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and was its chief travel writer and photographer from 1978 until 2004. She has written two acclaimed collections of travel writing, Roads Less Traveled: Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth and Home on the Road: Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth. She is a contributor to the Star Tribune and MinnPost, and a mentor in the Split Rock Arts Program's Online Mentoring for Writers program.

Posted by learninglife at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)