Gentle Reader, the CBC, in their infinite wisdom, have preempted all news and current events programming for the next one and a half hours to treat us to the presidential debate of a foreign country. For my readers outside of Canada not familiar with the CBC, the initials stand for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. That's right, Gentle Reader. Our national broadcaster. Who, just over a year ago, in the USA, would have bothered to watch any of our prime minister debates for our federal election last year? Didn't think so.
So, right now, despite the horrible effect that Donald Trump's nasty, raspy voice has on my aging nerves, I am listening, with prayer, and trepidation. He is unhinged, a bully, chronically interrupts, and is consistently unwilling to level with facts. I only hope that Hillary Clinton who is remaining poised, cool and well-mannered, will kick his fat heiny to Jupiter and beyond.
This is so depressing that I think I'll spend the rest of this space writing about how travel has enriched my life.
It has happened in so many ways, but first let me offer a full disclosure here. I didn't have my first trip outside of Canada or the US until I was thirty-five. I often was so embarrassed as a youth, hearing and being regaled by all, or at least many, of my friends about their travel stories: to Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Polynesia, Australia. I felt left out, deprived. I felt also ashamed, not for a lack of courage, but a lack of funds. I didn't have the benefit of Mom and Dad to stay with and foot the bill while I worked, saved, went to university and take a few months off for my coming of age world journey. It wouldn't have worked for me anyway. For the most part these trips of one's youth have always been the privilege of the middle class. I didn't grow up middle class, and from my parents' bitter divorce on I have lived mostly in poverty.
My mother died from lung cancer when I was thirty-four. A few months later I received money from her life insurance policy and went to Europe for two months. I regret that I didn't go far beyond Britain, except for a couple of weeks spent in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. On the other hand, there are so many images of places I saw, visited and people I met that are still engraved in my memory: the green manicured marvel of Kensington Palace Gardens, Hyde Park and Kew Garden. The architectural marvel of St. Paul's Church. The young man sharing a beer with me on the train. Edinburgh Castle and the old cemetery down below where I got lost late one night. The massive poppy and wheat fields among the ancient stones of Avery. The lovely eccentric people, working in a fashion co-op with a café in the back, a repurposed rail car, where I often went for baguette and brie for breakfast. The young African man who robbed me at knife point my first night in Amsterdam because I stopped to admire the profile of the stepped gable roofs of seventeenth century houses across the canal. The vision I had in a thousand year old church in Cologne of a gathering of medieval nuns. The wonderful symmetrical columns of the Palaise de Justice in Brussels. The woodlands and fields and the palace maze in Hanover. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Sitting among the ruins of a church, a surviving monument to the Allied bombings of Hannover during the Second World War. Petting three friendly horses on the outskirts of Cardiff. Lying in a stone cradle at the peak of Arthur`s Seat as the wind blew over me in Edinburgh.
Seeing for the first time in Costa Rica birds I had known only in picture books: the resplendent quetzal, orioles, motmots and hummingbirds in Monteverde and flocks of green and orange parakeets in downtown San Jose. Hearing the roaring of howler monkeys in the early morning and walking protectively with two young New Yorkers in the Cloud Forest who had been frightened by the roar of a jaguar. The incredible otherworldly serenity while sitting quietly in a clearing in the jungle, the glorious blue morpho butterflies.
The bougainvillea spilling over hacienda walls in glowing magenta and red splendour as viewed from the winding cobbled streets of San Angel and Coyoacan in Mexico City; feeling transported hundreds and thousands of years while sitting on the steps of ruined temples and pyramids in Teotihuacan and Palenque. Reading and perfectly understanding in Spanish the heart wrenching poem by Rosario Castellanos in the Plaza de las tres culturas in Mexico City, honouring the students murdered there by police and military days before the opening of the 1968 Olympics. Living in a foreign language, Spanish, as it rapidly becomes my own.
My travel experience is still limited and brief compared to some of the tireless globe-trotters I know and admire. There are many parts of the world I will never see. It doesn`t matter. It is the places I have already known and grown to love and the possible future places that I will embrace as beloved extensions of my home. These trips, these places, these people have all changed me, and are changing me still. I never thought I could do it. I am still poor. Somehow God blesses me every year to go on these trips. I am becoming both older and younger as I age.
And the wretched debate is finally over!
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