Next Monday I'll be meeting my Mom in Barcelona! My Mom is an amazing traveler, and so was her mother. My grandmother was widowed relatively young, and I really don't have all the facts on her travels - only what has come up in conversation over the years, but maybe one of my relatives will see this post and give me some more history. Mom, yeah, you're the number one suspect for that job. Back to my grandmother...I know she took her daughters on extensive trips all over Europe, including Greece, and Spain during Franco's dictatorship. This has produced both serious and hilarious revelations about my mother - including an instinctual distaste for Catholic cathedrals dripping in gold in the middle of terrible poverty, and her incredibly endearing stories of touring Greek ruins. She still can't talk about Greek ruins without breaking out laughing about getting guided tours of what amounted at times to a single remnant section of a single column of what was at one time a great temple. What I love, of course is that these were her favorite tours, because she got to use her imagination to fill in what those places must've been like.
What was amazing about my grandmother, too, was that she traveled all over South America solo, in the sixties, collecting folk art. If you've traveled in South America even in the last 15 years, you can imagine what it must've been like then. It's not easy now, depending on where you go, unless you fly everywhere. She also traveled a ton within the United States, buying land high up in the Rockies in Crested Butte, Colorado back when there were a couple hundred people roughing it up there. She had 3 daughters and one son. Three out of the four have traveled extensively, doing everything from living and working in Argentina during the Dirty Wars to studying in France (back when France was not at all the place it is today) and then there's my uncle who, after decades spent without running water or electricity high up in the Rockies in a log cabin, now travels to more places than I can keep track of in his converted tug boat.
When my mother wasn't able to travel far (she did have three children), living at our house was an experience in imaginary travel. Don't get me wrong - my Mom wasn't some travel version of Martha Stewart, planning neatly garnished international meals or buying figurines and plates from around the world to populate a bohemian chic suburban home - she was more like Anthony Bourdain being left in a bedroom community outside of New York City, alone all day with three kids, sometimes slowly going out of her mind with boredom, sometimes achieving this rather quickly. Our decor was telling. We had a terrarium coffee table, a blinding orange sofa, a kitchen table covered in piles of bills and paperwork, and for a time we even had red polka dot stickers of various sizes decorating the kitchen cabinets like some feverish hallucination. Basically, we had everything different from what would usually be found in our suburban neighborhood. Nothing matched, particularly, but each piece had a little story. Mom was addicted to General Hospital in the early years of my life, but one day just gave it up. Later she'd watch Yoga With Lillias!, Richard Hittleman and Jack LaLanne. When the Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door my Mom would invite them in for coffee just to have some adult company. My mother being the least religious person you could hope to meet, I can only imagine what they must have discussed. We knew the Fuller Brush man very well, too. I can still see his face and smell his heavy cologne. He had a large mole next to his nose and a big, dyed black pompadour. He had a great voice - it was really deep and rich and he talked in that salesman type of lingo that knew no statements that couldn't be ended in an exclamation - "Well hello there! How are we today?!" They would sit and drink coffee but I'm not even sure if she ever bought anything. She must've. But if I was her Fuller Brush man I wouldn't have cared - she was by far the most promising conversation in the area. Our neighborhood wasn't a gold mine for sparkling personalities. Being a kid I just had a kid's perspective, but I also had access to the houses of my friends and those of some of our neighbors, and at 5 years of age I knew there was something wrong in our town. The place was full of bored women who dealt with that in the usual ways. Craziness, alcohol, medication, crazy hair styles, fashion addiction, anorexia, perfect wife syndrome, I'm too far gone to care syndrome, yacht club syndrome, over mothering, under mothering...and that doesn't cover the mafia wives, who lived cloistered away behind high walls in properties right on the water. Who knew what was happening there.
So my Mom was crazy bored, which led to many made up adventures around the neighborhood, around town, eventually to Florida, Puerto Rico, Saint Croix, France, and beyond. Sometimes she'd just yell, "Kids! Get in the car! We're going out!' And we'd drive around, going down every driveway posted with a "Private! Keep Out!" sign, every private beach road - anywhere forbidden, basically. Years later, traveling in France with Mom, she'd saunter past every "privé" sign, joking that it was okay because she knew Monsieur Privé very well. It was hilarious then and it would be impossible today. I'm forever grateful for Mom's irreverent approach to travel. It meant that we got to see places we never could've had access, but more importantly because it taught a gloves-off approach to seeing the world. It made everything an adventure - when we had tea or meals out of the house or out of the country my Mom was never the mom who would ask people to accommodate the staid palate of American kids. And I don't remember complaining about eating unfamiliar foods because we didn't know it was an option. If, for example, friends of my parents showed up for a Sunday afternoon get together with a box of Greek pastries, we were offered some. If we were rude enough to say we didn't like it, we got a look that said, "I'm sorry you're so dull and Americanized you can't appreciate anything." Being accused of being overly American in our house was a big insult. Maybe the biggest. This, despite the fact that we really were a very American family. My Mom's father was Scottish, but besides that we were just plain old American. Thank God no one ever told my parents that! They would've gotten the cold shoulder big time. And of course I'm kidding that my parents didn't know we were American, but my Mom had lived in France and my Dad had gone as far as two years of grad school toward being a Modern European history professor. They were determined not to live as if the rest of the world didn't exist. Products that were verboten in our house: Cool Whip, Cool Aid, Jello, soda, candy bars, Velveeta, Fluff, Hamburger Helper, Froot Loops, tuna casserole, etc. Anything overly processed and/or fake, aka American. Anything spelled with a K instead of a C was the devil. My Mom would shake her head in disgust at the ads in magazines and on TV for foods like Pringles Potato Chips, or Betty Crocker cake mixes. You know, I wish more Moms had done that. Even as teenagers, the phrase, "I've been eating too much fast food lately" never ever passed our lips. Just not an option - the lowest we would allow ourselves to sink in food quality was diner food, because diners qualified as a small adventure, and adventure was a major factor in all decisions, great and small. A good adventure could mitigate the sin of drinking Nestle hot cocoa, for instance, with it's toxic little fake marshmallows. In fact, that hot cocoa could actually comprise part of an adventure (a great conversation with someone interesting, being stranded after getting lost, etc) - drinking that nasty stuff against your will would add interest to any story. After all, it was something you'd never be shameless enough to say you liked. How American would that be?
So you get the picture - my Mom's everyday life is quite an adventure, and she has passed that on to us. I will be sure to update you on any adventures we have that are legal enough to be posted. As for the rest...use your imagination.
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