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Travel When You Are Homebound

Remembering a journey that mattered to you, and one that you hope to take
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My friend Danny Heitman has a lovely essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, about how we can comfort ourselves during this homebound period by dwelling with gratitude on journeys we have made in the past. He writes about how he and his wife last year traveled to England and France to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and how much pleasure he has derived lately reflecting on that trip. Excerpt:

Now, a world of temporary homebodies can take a look in the rearview mirror, learning—or relearning—what past travels sometimes teach.

This kind of armchair reminiscence, however confining, has a distinct advantage over travel itself. In memory, we tend to edit out inconvenient details, letting the luster of what’s left truly shine. When I think about our anniversary trip, the cramped airline seats and a gnarly sinus infection on my return flight have mercifully faded into the background. They’re easily obscured by more pleasant recollections, like our drive into the storybook splendor of the Cotswolds, or an afternoon aimlessly browsing for bargains in the bookstores of Charing Cross Road.

In this way, having traveled is far superior to actual traveling, something wannabe tourists now under lockdown can take to heart. Most of us travel in search of a story, but the pleasure of shaping the narrative comes only in retrospect—usually, within some quiet place back home.

Read the whole thing. It’s behind a paywall, but I found that accessing it through Danny’s Twitter feed opened it up:

In the spirit of Danny’s column, I’d like to ask you all to offer reflections on two things:

1. A trip you made that delights you to reflect on today, in this time of confinement; and
2. A trip that you would like to make once everything opens up again, and assuming that you have the money to do so. What I’m looking for here is a place that has, for whatever reason, become more precious to you since the lockdown started.

I’ll start.

Past Trip That Means A Lot To Me

I have been blessed to have traveled a lot in my life. It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of my family’s trip to England. That was a marvelous journey. It was the only time I’ve been overseas with my entire family, except for our October 2012 trip to Paris. We stayed a month in a rented apartment. Reflecting on that journey — it seems too trite to call it a vacation — has given me great pleasure these past eight years, and certainly does these days, with all five of us living together again, Matthew home from college.

Paris is my favorite city, and of course it was a joy to be there for the usual reasons one finds it joyful to be in Paris. Here’s something I wrote about my final walk through the Luxembourg Gardens:

Late yesterday afternoon, I was walking alone through the Luxembourg Gardens, down paths I had not yet explored. The fall wind was shaking the trees, and I was so moved by the beauty of all around me that I would stop every now and then to take it in, in all its sublimity. There were old men in ratty sweaters smoking cigars and playing pétanque. There was a young man pushing a frail old woman in a wheelchair down one of the lanes. Mothers and fathers walked hand in hand with their children, who would scamper away to point at sculptures. I came to the intersection of a curving path with a straight one, and saw a statue of the late Socialist leader Pierre Mendes France. He was a secular Jew, but on this day, the day of All Saints, someone left him a spray of red roses, with a ribbon that said, “In homage to Pierre Mendes France.” There is grandeur in that, I thought.

And I thought: God, I love this city.

I kept pulling out my iPhone to take photos, hoping to capture a sense of the deep, rich autumnal beauty on display in this elegant park — a source of wealth open to everyone in Paris — but the images were pale shadows of the real thing. Finally I thought, Put the camera down. You can’t capture these moments. They are passing through your hands. Everything passes. Just be here, and be thankful.

We have so many wonderful memories of being together as a family in the city, with me showing my kids — at the time, they were thirteen, eight, and six — Paris at a slow pace. Because we stayed there for a month, we had the time to take it easy. My favorite memories are of the walks we would take through the Luxembourg Gardens, but also small things, like going with one of the kids every morning to buy hot fresh baguettes at the bakery around the corner. Like the shot above, which was when Julie and I took our tea-crazy six-year-old Nora to the tea-seller Mariage Frères to pick out some tea to take home. (I never post photos of my kids, but this was eight years ago, and they look very different now, so I’ll make an exception.) Things like this view from our apartment window of the next-door church, whose bells bookended our days (that’s the back of my little girl’s head):

We would have had fun no matter where we were, but because Paris is so personal to me, introducing the city to my children, and sharing it with them, was so, so satisfying, in a way that no other city could have been. In fact, as I was sorting through the photos on my laptop, looking for images that didn’t feature the faces of the kids, Nora sat by me on the couch, and we looked at pictures and video clips, and reminisced. Here is a screengrab from a low-resolution video I took in our flat, of her taking her first bite of macaron (in the form of a giant one from Maison Kayser), and her brother Lucas, then eight, photobombing her; she punched him.

Those little moments are the ones that remain in my mind, and give me such comfort and joy. Last year’s trip to England was lovely, but to me, London is not Paris, and besides, the kids are older now. Their age made things more enjoyable in some respects, e.g., they could better appreciate historic sites. But there’s just no substitute for a child’s wonder. Their mother and I had a whole month to luxuriate in their adventure in the wonderland that is Paris. Funny, but I don’t recall much the hard times we had — the sibling squabbling, and such — though they were definitely a thing. Time has activated poetic memory, and edited out all the unhappy moments. We are left with October in Paris, en famille, a time that will never be again, because they are no longer children.

Trip I Would Like To Take When This is Over

The most amazing journey I’ve ever taken personally was to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. I went in the year 2000, sent by my newspaper, the New York Post, to cover Pope John Paul II’s historic pilgrimage. As a Christian, it is hard to express how strange, even miraculous, it feels to walk and to stand in the places you have heard about and read about your entire life, from the earliest days of Sunday school. Walking the road to Bethlehem, I looked out over the fields, and imagined shepherds tending their flocks by night when an angel appeared to them to announce the birth of the Christ child. Those may have been the very fields! And here is Gethsemane; that ancient olive tree was growing here when Jesus and his disciples rested here on the night Jesus was seized by the Romans. That is the spot where Herod’s temple once stood, and under the roof of this church are the sites where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead.

And on and on. There is literally no place like it for people whose lives and imaginations have been shaped by the world of the Bible. It makes your faith come alive like nothing else. It’s a long way to go, and not cheap to get there, but when the day comes when we can all travel again with ease, I hope to have saved the money to be able to take my wife and children there — to the Holy Land, the place where arose the stories that gave us life. I remember coming home from Jerusalem and telling my wife that one day, I would love to go back with her and our kids (we only had one then, and he was a baby). Well, that was 20 years ago. If we ever have the resources to make that pilgrimage as a family, I will make it happen. It’s too important to put off. I see that now. As Christians, we believe that God became a man, a Jew of this land, descended from the Jewish people, a pilgrim in these places, and no other. The rocks and hills and valleys of the Holy Land are sacred, but you don’t really understand what that means until you go there and touch them with your own hands and feet, and meet the people who are living there today, Arabs and Jews alike.

So, how about you? Recall a journey you once took, and why those memories matter to you today, and then talk about a journey you want to take, and explain why.

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