Dear Emily Writes Back readers,
Yesterday morning I woke at a little past 4 in the morning and lay in the dark feeling a firm but unidentifiable emotion. I’d had a dream about wanting to give my mom a blouse, but not being able to find her. Completely awake, I got out of bed and logged onto the computer, went to Expedia, and bought a plane ticket to California, where I knew she was headed soon to visit my brother and his family.
And now, one workday later, I am in the Newark Airport drinking too-strong Starbucks coffee and taking in the sights: Black people of every shade (Hello, my people, I have missed you!), toddlers day trading on iPads, harried yet all-knowing food service workers who have taken the measure of humanity and it’s not great, fancy white men my husband’s age wearing decorative scarves and expensive looking shoes (if I were a man, I don’t think I would dress like that. I’d dress in modest, sturdy work clothes and wear spicy cologne and keep whatever paperback philosophy book I was currently reading in my back pocket. And I’d bring back casual winking).
It turns out that my little sissy, Kate, is also headed to California this very second, so it will be a family reunion!
This trip is also something new. Impulsive yes, but this is my one life, and I don’t care much about solar eclipses. I saw a good one in 1979, and I’m already fully alive to the fact that we live on a spherical planet and that there are other planets and sometimes they line up in different ways and shadows are cast. While the sun is in shadow, I may be playing canasta with my blood relatives and holding a baby’s tiny foot in the palm of my hand.
It might be a side-effect of working at a hospice (last night was my volunteer shift in the patient residence) that you start to feel like you will probably die pretty soon yourself, an attitude not conducive to conservative spending.
Travel is the best. I bet in the next few days you’ll get a steady stream of reports from me from the great state of California.
And, harking back to this newsletter’s advice column/epistolary roots, please feel free to write me with any conundrums or questions or prompts, because travel makes me very clear-headed.
xoxo
Emily
I agree 100%!!
Great spontaneity for this baby-visit-family-reunion!!! ENJOY!!!!!