To Sing of Wanderlust
I have a traveling song. More often than not, I catch myself singing it quietly in airports between flights.
It’s Tom Waits’ “A Foreign Affair,” though when I hear it in my head, it’s usually sung by The Manhattan Transfer. I do hear it in Tom’s voice when I’m sipping a martini alone in a foreign bar, though:
“When traveling abroad in the continental style,
It’s my belief one must attempt to be discreet
And subsequently bear in mind your transient position
Allows you a perspective that’s unique.
Though you’ll find your itinerary’s a blessing and a curse,
Your wanderlust won’t let you settle down
And you wonder how you ever fathomed that you’d be content
To stay within the city limits of a small midwestern town.
Most vagabonds I knowed don’t ever want to find the culprit
That remains the object of their long relentless quest.
The obsession’s in the chasing and not the apprehending;
The pursuit, you see, and never the arrest.
Without fear or contradiction, bon voyage is often hollered
In conjunction with a handkerchief from shore
By a girl that drives a rambler and furthermore
Is overly concerned that she won’t see him anymore.
Planes and trains and boats and buses
Characteristically evoke a common attitude of blue
Unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport
And the cargo that they’re carrying is you.
A foreign affair, juxtaposed with a stateside
And domestically approved romantic fancy,
Is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
It will only be parlayed into a memory.”
Travel is a part of who I am. I spent my childhood in a constellation of places, strewn across the west coast from Portland to Phoenix. Family itself means travel to me. I grew up far from blood kin, traveling to visit them most every summer in a Jeep, in a camper, once in Dad’s six-seater Cessna. Today, my siblings and I each live in a different US time zone. I’ve never lived anywhere for more than seven years in a row, ever. I learned young that being able to set down roots and still pull them back up again is a survival skill.
In high school, taking my first steps into adulthood, travel became mine. I went to Mexico on a week-long missions trip. I went away to Chicago for college. I took spring break for another missions trip to a soup kitchen in Times Square. I went away to Amsterdam for a discipleship program, then off to Switzerland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia for outreach, all before the walls came down. I went off to Singapore for Bible school. (Yes, that's an awful lot of Jesus. I got better.) Every place that I went changed me, showing me new treasures of language, geography, food, customs, friends. I collect words and phrases as mementos: bună dimineaţa, sju hundra sjuttio sju, graag gedaan, pu yao, le agradezco, cannot lar, they slip neatly into my vocabulary like the tchotchkes tucked into the bookcase in my bedroom. Some places become a larger part of me, expanding my sense of self, my sense of other. I am convinced that travel outside the fifty states is one of the most important components of an American child’s education.
In my work life, I still travel a great deal. I am even now sitting on a big, empty hotel bed in southwest Connecticut, itching to get home tomorrow to my cat and my family, with possible destinations of New Hampshire and Iowa looming on the horizon for next month. Work has taken me around the world more than once, and has made it possible to visit friends and family as far apart as Alaska and Curaçao. Travel is ever a treasure to me, even when it’s to Des Moines.
I am mindful of all this today because my baby girl, my little one, my niiban is coming to the cusp of learning some of these things for herself. Her mother and I have always lobbied for a gap year, a hiatus to separate the compulsory from the collegiate. We both took a similar break just after starting college and have always cherished the changes that wrought in us. The little one is just finishing high school this summer, days before her 18th birthday. She’s agreed to take the year off and spend at least part of it traveling. Yes, yes, there will be a plan, and a safety net, it’s all going to be fine. But she’ll be forging her own relationship with the great, wide world, having her own adventures, discovering her own truths, finding her own treasures. I envy her those moments “in the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all.” I envy those first discoveries, that first sense of truly owning one’s own life, catching herself building her own history, her own legends. Those experiences led me to all of the things that I love most about being me. I don’t know if she’ll catch the wanderlust as I have, but chances are, she will. We’ve always been too alike for our own good. I do know that she’ll be changed, though. If I know her, she’ll come back more her than she’s ever been, a her that I’ve always wanted to meet. And maybe she’ll remember to call me from that spot on the Charles Bridge, at the foot of the cross, where I was almost arrested for preaching on the streets of Communist Prague.