Tag: travel

contents of the brain

Ten days of prep; eleven days before we get on the plane.  Going back to Hanoi, Vietnam. Soon.

I’ve made a long list a few weeks ago—finding, buying, arranging for, packing, and some home tasks because I love coming home to a cleaner house than I usually live in. I always do this. Tasks that are too arduous and not at all important fall to the wayside, but a few non-essential tasks get done along with the travel tasks. The big one this time is going through clothes—Julia’s and mine—and culling what we do not use. I haven’t done this with Julia since we moved into this apartment. She was resistant, but she seems to be happier in the morning picking out what she will wear for the day. I parted with just a few old things and a few things that either don’t fit anymore or that I haven’t really liked for a few years but hated to get rid of because they were perfectly wearable. Someone else will benefit and enjoy—at least that is what I tell Julia.

I am on the part of the list that is starting to be about packing. I’ve decided to take very few clothes—4 days’ worth (except for underwear) to be exact—and to plan to buy there.  We did that anyway last time, so might as well travel with loose bags going.  Julia is on board, and it will be interesting to see if she can buy clothes there and wear them. It will be harder for her than for me. If it is too hard, we’ll just be washing those four changes every four days.

I am not taking jeans, which is a first for me.  I live in jeans and usually travel in them even when I don’t use them when I arrive somewhere, but Vietnam is in the 80’s and 90’s right now, and when we come back in June, we’ll be close to that here.  I keep saying all that to myself to convince myself to do as I’ve planned.  Funny, how compulsive or obsessive I can be! It does help me understand Julia just a bit when I dig down into my own muck. 

One of my plans for this trip was to find ways for Julia to be a bit away from Ed and me. I have been looking for a companion or somewhere like a day program setting where she might spend a few days or a day a week. Although pursuing this pretty strenuously, I may have completely failed.  I was very excited to connect with one center that seems to be centered on training young adults on the spectrum for work by running a café, bookstore, and media center (not sure of this last one). I was corresponding with someone who is or was a director, and he invited Julia to visit and possibly take part. Then, last week, I received an email from him that is confusing, so I don’t know if any of that will happen. Julia is excited about some independence, and I still hold out hope I can find something.

My task list divided into daily tasks was created by AI.  ChatGPT, to be exact. I’ve been playing around with AI and was feeling overwhelmed when I needed to make the list. And AI did a decent job of a list. I’ve been modifying it as I go along. Today, with the big event of the day cancelled, I can do a few things on the list that I thought I would abandon—some gardening and clean-up of a file drawer—as well as reconnoitering the contents of the green toiletries bag that usually has everything from bandaids to nail clippers to antibiotic ointment. My pharmacy in a bag. Ed always says that I can get all of it there, which is true. Absolutely. But when someone needs to get rid of a headache, it is so nice to have it instantly instead of finding a pharmacy and trying to explain my needs to someone with limited English, and me with less than limited Vietnamese. 

And the cancelling of the day’s event, a brunch, also gives me the breathing room to sit down and write. Something that I have been neglecting. I started and did not complete a post about my quick trip to Virginia to my brother-in-law’s funeral. I will finish and post, not today.

There you have it, the contents of my brain this morning.

(I seem to have lost the “continue reading” sign, so for now, this will be all on the front page. Damn!)

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traveling companions, pt.1

Breakfast in Hanoi 2023

We are booked to return to Hanoi for more than a month in late spring. Airline tickets are bought. A deposit has been paid on the apartment we stayed in back in 2023. The official purpose of the trip is to attend the high school graduation of Giau, the son of the young woman Ed has guided since she was a teenager. It is sweet to be invited back for this moment, to witness a milestone in a family whose lives have been woven into Ed’s life over time and now into Julia’s and mine.

This time, planning feels different. With a place to stay arranged and a beloved pho shop just a stone’s throw away, I can already envision some of the more intriguing details.

One of the things I would like to arrange is a companion or guide for Julia while we are in Hanoi. I briefly flirted with this idea on our last trip, but became overwhelmed by the logistics and let it go. This time, I am sending out feelers and following up on any small clue that might lead somewhere. The hope is modest and specific: that Julia might spend a morning, an afternoon, or even a day exploring the city without me. Maybe a museum, a park, or a place to do art or crafts. Not every day. Just sometimes.

Independence is complicated to teach, and travel has always been one of the most meaningful ways Julia develops those skills. Since she is now 25, I would love for her to have opportunities to move through the world with a little more autonomy, even while far from home.

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looking back at birthday weekends

Julia and I have birthdays a week apart. We have celebrated separately and together, had parties, and just stayed home.  It is January and cold. This year we’ve been out and about for both weekends.

We, our trio, spent Julia’s weekend in New York City. Friday evening to Monday morning.  We saw two plays.  “And Juliet,” a musical, is a wild romp. Lots of fun, old pop music that most of the audience knew by heart. Everyone sang, including Julia, who followed some of the audience and got up to dance a few of the tunes. The cast is splendid, and the script is very clever. Fireworks and confetti were the icing on the cake.

On Sunday, we saw “Liberation.” A memory play about a young woman of today confronting her deceased mother’s 70’s conscience-raising group. A seven-woman cast with a strong script. The nude scene at the beginning of Act 2 was only slightly shocking. Five minutes into the scene, having no clothes on was simply the costume that the characters wore. It was a pleasure to be in the theater that night. Unfortunately, the play is set to close on February 1.

On Saturday, we saw “All that’s left of you,” a new film set in the Occupied West Bank, tracing the life of one family from 1948 to the present. It is a small, quiet movie, emotional, and heartbreaking. With only a limited release, it will be hard to find but totally worth pursuing.  

Also, on Saturday, we did one of the tours at the Tenement Museum.  Julia and Ed had never been there. I was there a long time ago. We did the 1902 Women’s Tour that featured a story about the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902, organized and led by the neighborhood’s women. It was as good as I expected it to be. We all would like to return for another tour. Julia wants to see a Chinese immigrant story from the 1980’s next time. The 80’s just doesn’t sound like history to this old lady! To Julia, ancient history.

Besides all that, we saw friends for Friday evening dinner and ate Korean and Mexican food, but missed the street of Indian food in Jersey City that our hotel was close to. I guess we will have to go back. We stayed in Jersey City and used the Path Train. The rain/snow mix was icky to walk around in, and so, we didn’t do much strolling around. However, the mix was so much better than just plain cold rain, about which I reminded everyone every few hours.

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vermont 2

It is Indigenous Peoples Day. We are in Vermont, ready to leave today to return home. Julia’s day center is closed today. It will rain for most of today and tomorrow. I hope to stop to do some food shopping on our way home and make butternut squash soup for tonight’s dinner.

There the scene is set. 

It disturbs me greatly that trump proclaimed today a celebration of “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.” It goes on to say that “[u]pon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.”

Why does he—or they because that man cannot speak a single coherent sentence. There are way too many grammatically correct sentences and way too much warped “history” to believe that trump had anything to do with the drafting of his proclamation.— but why does he need to lie ALL of the time?

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vermont 1

Shelburne, Vermont. Definitely morning frost. And thank goodness it also turned chili at home before we left. The extra sweatshirt thrown into the bags at the last minute will be used!

Ed and I are ensconced in a sweet and small B&B owned by an architect turned painter and her husband, who is very nice, but I haven’t drilled him on his work life. Yet.

Julia is at Zeno Mountain Farm for a five-day, four-night weekend. She went to their fall weekend last year and was invited back for this year.  (She has not yet been invited for summer camp, which is my goal for her. Once invited, she can come up every year for the rest of her life.  Everyone does, and thus, the wait is long for a spot.) She helped me pack her stuff and then re-pack when we found out how cold it was really going to be. The ride up was pleasant and uneventful until we got to the country road part that goes up and down a mountain for almost 30 miles, okay, a small mountain. Julia began getting angry, anxious, and extremely unpleasant.  At one point, she lobbed a sweater at Ed, who was driving. She spent a good deal of time swearing at the mountain, the road, and us. By the time we arrived at the Farm, I had to spend time with her trying to figure out what she wanted to do. (Not at all sure what we would do if she wanted to not go to Zeno altogether.)

I was unsure if we could leave her.

And then she went through the big farmhouse doors, and someone said hello to her. And in almost an instant, or at least a few minutes, she was all smiles. Hugging two people she knew, ready to hand off her meds to the nurse and go to her assigned room on the third floor. When she came downstairs, she was ready to have us leave. She gave us happy hugs and went off to a giant bay window with couches in front of it to watch the sunset. 

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no. 15

Fifteen years is a long time. I can tick off who has grown, where and how we’ve lived, who has come into my life and who has left, what I have learned and some of what I have forgotten, what new toys I have acquired and what I have let go of. It feels like a lifetime of change and it feels like a moment.

Fifteen years ago today, around lunchtime, David died. I still miss him. I can almost imagine sitting down and having a conversation with him. I have so much news and so many questions. At the same time, however, I cannot imagine it at all. He is too far in time and space and changes away.

Time seems to have wiped away, wiped clean, the most painful missings, the heart-wrenching grieving, leaving in its wake a sweetness, a place from which strength could be built. I know the pilings on which this life I now live rests.

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coming home

Home.  I have chewed on the concept and the actual location of the place for a long time.  I have lived in places where I never felt at home, sometimes gradually finding enough of my people in those places to hold on and not wither away. I lived in places that felt like home, left them with every intention of coming back, never to return. There are places in-between—places where I felt some connection with the air of the place and made important friendships. Boston is one of those places. I moved from Jersey to Cambridge in the middle 70’s to live with David. He had been at Brandeis, dropping out to play in the pit band of the show, Lenny, and then just staying on.  I liked the city then and the neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge where we lived.  I was willing to move back to somewhere around here after we finished our degrees. David wanted NYC as home and very certainly, I fell in love with NYC and had no regrets. 

We never returned together to Boston, and when we left NYC for the midwest, I forgot that I had feelings for Boston, the place. 

And I did not quite realize, when I lived in Madison for twelve years, how much that had grown to be a home. It was a hard place to leave. Not the home that I came from, I will never be a midwesterner but the place with the people who supported me, and Julia, those first years of her with us and all the years after David left.  

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morning walk on the beach 

Ferry Beach, Saco, Maine

Impressions in wet sand. Sneekers and boots, sandles and a few bare and naked feet. Just a few bare feet, it is october afterall.  Round impressions from walking sticks and baby feet every so often. But regularly, those baby feet. And I wonder why. I imagine a parent, scooping up a toddler into a piggy back ride and then letting the wiggling wee one down after a short riding respite. Dog prints in wild archs going in and out of the ends of waves, the line where the tide erases everything. 

And I imagine how sooner or later, tonight and tomorrow early morning, a tide will come in and take away all traces of our shod and unshod animal prints. Flood the prints with the waves coming ashore, leaving the sand smooth and pristine again. 

What if the bits of sadnesses, stresses, worries and longings of our lived days were left in the prints we leave during our walkings. Left to be swollowed up by the lapping water. As if by intention, as if what we could not carry any longer could be returned to some universe. As if by returning to the sea what we could not bear, we might be comforted and even healed by the rhythmn of the to and fro, in and out, of the salty waves. 

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because it’s june, june, june, june . . .

I am a gardener.  

I’ve begun at least four memoir pieces with that sentence but honestly, I wondered if I would ever really feel like I was that declaration again.  At the blue Victorian that we moved to from Madison and in which we spent the Covid years, I cultivated a small vegetable patch that was shaded part of the day by the houses around it.  It is never a glorious garden but it gave us something to do that first summer of shut down and there were tomatoes and greens and peppers and a small pumpkin. 

Early on in my tenancy at our present house, I asked the landlord if I could garden.  The foundation planting was sparse and old. There must have been other shrubs and bushes at one time but what was left was four plants spread far apart and planted up close to the house.  

My landlord said I could do what I wanted to do and even volunteered a bit of help—his landscapers trimmed bushes that needed the trimming and even took the grass up when I decided on the shape of the front garden bed.  

I started planning the front bed while I was sick and unable to do much running around.  As I began the planning, I wondered if it made sense to invest in a garden that would take a few years to develop and cultivate in a rental house but I came to the idea that I have made three gardens, each in a house that I owned.  But that after planting and tending and loving those gardens, I sold the houses and left those gardens. And it wasn’t so much the beauty of the gardens that I was/am most attached to, it is the process of making a garden and making a garden in the front of this house that we live in would give me pleasure.  

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coming home

Coming home: Get on a bunch of planes. Watch a bunch of movies and eat the weird combination of what is airplane food—My favorite food during our longest flight today from Tokyo to San Francisco was two saltine crackers with a pat of cream cheese. Exactly like something I’d eat when there was nothing else to eat in the house. Try to sleep mostly unsuccessfully and ultimately stumble from plane to plane to immigration/customs to plane and to a lovely friend who drove us home.

After thirty hours traveling, those beds in Newton were incredibly comfortable!

But to back up —

On our last night in Hanoi, we had a hot pot supper—various kinds of meat and vegetables that are brought to the table raw along with a pot of boiling broth on a heater.  It’s good and I’ve liked the idea both back home and in Hanoi.  We’ve eaten it a number of times in Vietnam, but truthfully, when I go out to eat, I’d much rather have the cook do the cooking instead of one of us at the table. Still, it seems like a favorite with the people of Hanoi, including our friend, Tra My. 

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