Big Dreams, Small World

Magnify

By my 10th birthday, I’d established myself as a world traveler. I had visited a remarkable number of foreign countries all by myself, and my memories of each locale were colorful and distinct. I couldn’t help but smile, recalling the lilt of an odd-sounding greeting in an old market square, the smell of the ice-capped sea or the wildflowers on the hill above the village, the taste of goat’s milk or saffron or raspberry fool. While my journeys took place only between the pages of the books I’d borrowed from the library, they were no less real to me than if I had glided down a ship’s gangplank onto foreign turf, passport in hand.

The bewildering truth was that my family never went anywhere together, not anymore. When I was tiny, we had trooped off to Bethany Beach for a golden week or so beside the waves, or made regular summer-long visits to Lake Champlain before my grandmother’s small cottage was sold. These days the farthest we ever trekked was to the airport, which struck me as an especially cruel and unusual punishment given the mysterious family travel moratorium. We spent several Sunday afternoons a month collecting my mother’s elderly mother in the station wagon and bumping along the turnpike to Dulles International and back, like some sort of strange religious pilgrimage. My grandmother, who was born before the turn of the century, had never flown. It pleased her to be taken to the newly opened airport in Virginia on a regular basis just to watch the airplanes taking off. She especially liked to corral my father and mother into driving her there - afraid of her tantrums and her uncannily timed fainting spells, they always acquiesced. Though I didn’t have a choice, I went quietly along for the ride each Sunday, pretending we were on our way to parts unknown. The shiny, vast expanse of Dulles itself would have thrilled me if I’d had a ticket and a suitcase. As it was, I felt a special torture had been designed especially for me, having to stand earthbound near my grandmother’s wheelchair, reading the names of exotic destinations on the departure boards and envying the streams of glamorous, luggage-laden travelers hurrying toward their gates.