Author: Bev

Spring has sprung in these parts.  The daffodils’ sunny faces have enlightened our landscape.  Easter has come and gone.  But, resurrection, thankfully, will stick around for weeks to come.

On one of my walks through the woods, I noticed a tree with a massive gash in its trunk.  Although this time of year, with just emerging foliage, it’s difficult to know if the tree was dead, but I don’t think it was.  Then, I walked a bit further and noticed a couple of other live trees, smaller ones with similar gashes, in scale to their smaller size.

This got me to thinking about wounds.  Further, I began to contemplate the healing of wounds and even more, about unhealed wounds and healed-over wounds.

A wound is defined as an injury involving division of tissue due to external violence.  This is a physical wound to a person, animal, or plant.  Then there are wounds to the feelings, emotions, mind, sensibilities, etc.  I’m a little more familiar with the workings of the latter than the former, given my education, and proclivity for things psychological.

I find it fascinating that some of the listed synonyms of the noun, wound, are: injury, trauma, torment, anguish, heartbreak, grief, and distress; mostly psychological things.  Even more interesting are the antonyms which include joy, comfort, contentment, and happiness; also, psychological things.

I promise I won’t psychobabble you, but I do have some thoughts on the subject. Starting with tree wounds, the thing that started all of this thinking.  The bottom line is, tree wounds don’t heal, they seal.  Tree’s wall-off injured tissue and continue to generate new tissue outside of the wounded area.

I think a lot of people are walking around like wounded trees, with deep unhealed psychological injuries that have been walled-off, sealed up and consciously ignored.  Given the definitions of wound, I don’t believe this is much of a leap in logic.

You’ve heard the term, “walking-wounded,” those of us who look healed and whole, but in reality, all that is healed is the acute blood-letting part of the original wound.  New tissue has been generated surrounding the old wound and life has gone on, as life does, in altered form.

Some of our wounds have been sutured, glued, and plugged.  We’re covered over with scabs and scars, and new tissue that is about 80% as strong as our original condition.

Healing of wounds requires moisture and often that moisture is maintained by a covering, the proverbial “band-aid.”  But wounds, can’t remain covered eternally and might become unhealthily dependent on the bandage.  Also, I’ve watched enough “doctor”-shows on television to know that some wounds are better left open for a time in order to heal thoroughly.

As to the psychological wound, it seems that the bandage, covering or hiding the wound, necessarily protects the person from acute pain and becoming overwhelmed, in the short term.  Then, there comes a time to expose the wound, to air it out, and this means to talk, communicate, talk and communicate some more, for healing to occur.

Have you heard of “airing out your grievances?”  Otherwise, there remains a chronic wound underneath the healthy tissue, rising up now and again from the unconscious, in the form of anger, defensiveness, fierce independence, fear, divisiveness, secrecy, depression, restlessness, agitation, and general malaise from an otherwise unknown origin.

If you think you’re immune to inner wounds, think again.  Having studied prenatal psychology many years ago, I can testify that some professionals believe we’re wounded from the trauma of birth.  So, there’s that.

What most of us recognize as simply personality traits, are frequently not something we’re born with, but something we’ve developed as defense mechanisms to cover our wounds.  Most of these wounds, I would surmise are unknown consciously to us.  They’ve been so thoroughly covered over, walled-off, and obscured by what’s happened since then, that they just “belong” to us and we don’t know any different.  We’ve adapted to the wound.

The good news is that healing is possible if we learn to talk, communicate, and talk some more. Eighty-percent strong are good odds.  Human tissue, unlike that of wounded trees, is capable of self-generated repair, restoration, replacement and regeneration.  The sutures of communication help to rebuild new tissue because they close the mass of the original wound needing healed.

I’m reminded of a song on my jogging playlist, Breathe (2 AM) by Anna Nalick, which in part, laments, “winter just wasn’t my season….”  If winter wasn’t your season, hooray that Spring brings hope for something better. I wish you all a happy resurrection, and Godspeed with your wound-healing.

 

Sadly, I’m back into some familiar territory in a real-time battle with the American customer service system.  This is bureaucracy at its worst and that’s fifteen minutes of my life that I will never get back.

My thought was that I’d just make a quick telephone call instead of trying to do this online.  Yeah, sure.

Ring, ring….  The automated system picks up and there’s a familiar click, click, click of the system attempting to recognize my telephone number.

There’s a thought in the back of my mind that this might not go well.  I’m calling for another party who’s unable to handle the rigamarole of customer service inquiries.  Supposedly, I’m better equipped to navigate this morass.

And it’s a Monday morning.  What was I thinking?

The automated system addresses me with a few questions to secure my identity.  Now I’m a little bit closer to knowing that this won’t go well, because “we” are going through “my” information, not the information about said other party about whom I’m calling.

“We” go through my balance, which was paid in full, on time.  Then, it’s time for my options, of which I’m hoping one will at least vaguely match what I’m calling about.  No such luck.

I’m paraphrasing here because it’s become a blur as to exactly what the options were.

Option one: “Do you want to make a payment?”  Option two: “Do you need service?”  Option three: “Have you moved?”  Option four: “Do you need to switch services?”  Option five: “Do you have an outage?”

I couldn’t honestly choose any of these options, so I chose Option six: MORE OPTIONS.

Don’t you know that “more options” didn’t provide the magic bullet to help me get to a real person.  So, as we all do, I frantically pressed zero in quick succession, trying in vain to outwit the automated system.  I wanted to blow-out the system so that it would give up and send me to a person.

Again, not so much.  The system simply started over.  “We see that you did not choose an option.”  “Do you want to make a payment…?”

I’m really not all that dense, but I am susceptible to frustration with inanimate objects that buck my will.  At the end of “more options,” I yelled, “ANOTHER ACCOUNT” into the phone, then hit the zero again, about five times. 

Like all of us, I thought that if I said it louder, I might get the response I needed.  But I blew-out that blasted automated system which then had the temerity to hang up on me.  Can you believe it?

My next strategy was to call again but this time pretend to the automated system that it was my account that I was calling about.  Then when a live person got on the phone, I’d pull the switch, “I’m really calling about another account, can I give you the account number?”

I couldn’t help but feel sneaky and a little bit guilty about this deception.  But it was all I could think to do to get past the automaton.  And it worked, I reached Tamyra.

As soon as Tamyra answered, I told her that I needed to speak to her about another account, not the one associated with the telephone number from which I was calling.  I went on, as I sometimes do, especially when I’m nervous, to tell her that it was for so-in-so who is having trouble with their service/product.

Tamyra quickly switched paths and asked for the account number, which I provided.  Then, it happened, the real person needed more information to verify my identity.  Thankfully, my spouse’s name opened the door enough for me to get my foot in.

He, however, had to get on the phone to “allow me permission” to continue with my inquiry.  I am a modern woman, and this little quirk of “security” ticks me off quite profoundly.  It’s too reminiscent of “allowing the little woman access to big, important things that just the men can understand.”  You get my tone?

At any rate, Tamyra moved through her various screens and attempted to process my request, which involved ordering a replacement piece of equipment.  Then she said something like, “uh-oh, there’s an error…” and asked me kindly to hold while she did some research.  After a few minutes, she came back on the phone and said her computer had frozen and she’d have to transfer me to another representative to follow-through with my replacement order.

I replied with something I thought was friendly and witty like, “Isn’t that like a Monday morning; I hope your computer thaws quickly.”  Tamyra met my retort with silence, expressing no sense of humor.  God only knows what she was going through, but she clicked me through.

I awaited another representative, but what I got was another automated system with options which as far as I could tell, had NOTHING to do with my obtaining a replacement “box.”  These options, paraphrased because there is no way I could translate accurately, might have been presented in a foreign language, so technical were they.

Option one: “Are you police, a municipality, fireman, etc.?”  Option two: “Do you need a RNC4F…?”  Option three: “Do you need a Q-fitter to replace your X10?”  Option four: – I just can’t do this anymore, so I pressed the trusty zero, a few times and the system hung up on me.

God help me! 

P.S. After trying online with no path through the security morass, I placed another call, got a person, and was disconnected right at the “let me give you your order #.”

I dialed this now familiar number yet another time, got a guy, went through a dozen options, changed my mind from option two, selection A to option two, selection B and a technician is coming out on Wednesday to install said option.

Now it’s been three hours of my life that I’ll never get back.  Oh well, I did a good deed and there’s nothing bad about that.

 

 

 

 

Our lives are an accumulation of a variety of moments.  I think the cliché is that we all experience the good, the bad, and the ugly.  A few of our moments are unpleasant or downright traumatic, but we’ve lived through them.

Because of a dream, I thought about one of those unpleasant moments in my life and a light switched on.  If it weren’t for that moment that I often wished I hadn’t experienced, I wouldn’t be here where I am now with all of the awesome goodness that followed “then.”

That moment that I’d rather not relive, turned out to be a necessary piece of the fabric that God has used to knit together my life.  Without that particular and specific cog in the wheel, I would never have been catapulted to this place, space, and circumstances, nor developed the character that most of us would identify as personality.

Remember the old adage that bad things happen to good people?  This is one of the inexplicable facts of life.  Its opposite, good things happen to bad people, is also an observable fact.

Trying to figure out why these things are so is a futile exercise.  The result of the exercise would be a banging your head against a wall moment.

I came to a theological conclusion many years ago, based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:5, that God sends sun as well as rain to both good and bad people, alike.  Similarly, Peter (I Peter 5:9) says that our fellow human beings all over the world undergo the same sufferings.

I surmise that in order to come to a place of satisfaction with one’s moments in life, either good or bad, we must endure some measure of suffering, or pain.  I base this theory on the evolution of the word satisfaction, which can be understood as the performance of penance.

In other words, we pay a price for life-satisfaction.  Having experienced what we feel is enough pain, and the cost starts to feel too high, most of us plow forward to reap the rewards of a life well-and-truly lived.

But, in the meantime, there is waiting.  During the waiting or the time of paying penance, we usually encounter moments of pretending that what we’ve experienced was enough, already.

Do you remember marking time with the marching band?  It’s necessary for getting the rhythm right before taking off down the street.

Rock songs occasionally mark time with the traditional one, two, three, four, sometimes accompanied by the solid click of drum sticks.  Then, you’ve learned, the other instruments will take it away, starting the tune that you’re now widely anticipating.

Most of us do a sort of percussive marking time while waiting in line, or waiting for anything.  Old timers called it fidgeting.

It can be a tap of the toe, drumming your fingers on a table or grocery cart handles.  It can be the more obvious shifting of your body weight from one leg to the other, a little heavier and clunkier than the usual dance.  But it’s a dance nonetheless, a noticeable dance of waiting.

There are so many lines, the British call them queues, to wait in these days.  I don’t know if there are more today than yesteryear or if people are more impatient or if I’m just noticing more impatience.

Some folks dance with their fingers; the keyboard of their phone, their accompaniment.  It’s not as solitary an action as one might think.  “Dance with Me” by Orleans and Abba’s “Dancing Queen” come to mind for some reason.

Obviously, these are empirical observations, an anecdotal story, not the heavily scientific kind of fact.  However, I invite you to replicate my statements by observing people the next time you find yourself in line somewhere. 

You’ll see.  There is a rhythm to our moments.

 

“The pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.” Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room with a View, was on a grand tour of Europe, acquiring an informal education expected for her time and social class.

I wasn’t looking to be educated, but like Lucy Honeychurch, I serendipitously found happiness through travel to Europe.  But in this column, I hope to address the intersect between inner travel from home, and boots on the ground travel.  If your destination is happiness, they’re the same.

I expected to love Italy and her gregarious people and awesome food.  Can you say Parmesan and Asiago?  But the countryside was meh.

Equally, I was prepared to abhor France with what I thought would be snooty people, runny cheeses and sauce-saturated food.  I even expected to feel frumpy in the presence of French women.

But not so much.  I mostly got away with properly enunciating the French niceties I had memorized, even after my failed attempt at college-French.  And the French women didn’t take a second look.

There are all kinds of travelers.  I think most people travel with a plan – at most, they have an agenda or itinerary, and at least, a guidebook.

Other people, there are probably fewer of us, travel not so much with a plan, but an outline that usually ends up buried at the bottom of our bags and we just drive, stopping where we feel like stopping.  More often than not, the places that strike us at the moment, end up being our most eventful experiences.  Sometimes, not; but those are the fabric of travel tales.

I’ve said it before, “the best things in life just happen.” This is one of those things I’ve observed again and again to be true and unshakable, a concept that could not be better experienced than in my travels.

Years ago, my husband and I visited a number of U.S. cities, and several restaurants in them.  We had some truly memorable dining experiences at places that we happened upon.  Only later were some of them enshrined by means of media such as the New York Times.  We thought we discovered them – Christopher Columbus, were we. 

The best steak I’ve ever consumed was at the Pecan Street Café in Austin, Texas.  The best steak and cheese sandwich was in the convention center in Columbus, Ohio (sorry Philadelphia).  The best seafood-ish platter, including my first frog’s legs, way too obviously the real thing, on a plate, was in New Orleans at Mulates the Original Cajun Restaurant.  Lastly, in this slew of bests was the best bagel I’ve ever eaten, from a storefront in Albany, New York.

My unusual point here is that the first unplanned, magical dining moment when we discovered a place, could not be repeated.  Celebration by the media deteriorated the restaurants and diminished the allure of our returning more than once.

Back to Europe, I was surprisingly warm to rural France as well as the Paris neighborhood where we stayed a few days.  The round-abouts grew familiar and less scary to navigate the countryside.  I marveled at lace curtains in otherwise, humble stone garages through village after village.

One highlight of our trip was Arles, France, the site of a favorite movie, Ronan.  The old, worn cobbled streets around the ancient Roman coliseum, and the ruins themselves, made me feel fulfilled in the way described by Oliver Goldsmith in his 1764 poem, The Traveler: “Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms.”  In France, go figure.

Also, in Arles, my husband and I sat at a table in a courtyard just under some dying jasmine still strikingly fragrant.  A lizard crawled casually around the stone-encased, arched doorway leading to our hotel room.  Below a Juliet balcony, we hadn’t planned to eavesdrop on the faint voices of the guests inside the open window.

A couple of exceptions to my preference for France after having visited the continent, were in Italy.  In Lucca, we rode bikes – a skill I hadn’t exercised since childhood, all around the walled city.  We weaved through a street performance of a Puccini aria in celebration of his birth in the city, dodging the smell of freshly cured ham potently streaming from a shop.  Our bike route took us along a canal near our hotel, to a nearby botanical garden where we delighted in turtles and trees.

My husband lived for a number of years in Verona.  We visited the apartment building where he lived, and saw the shopkeepers window he accidentally broke.  I couldn’t believe the streets, home to Hermes, Louboutin, Versace, Givenchy…, just off the square at the famed coliseum, were constructed of huge street-sized slabs of marble tied together in a parquet pattern – the street, mind you.

Before leaving for that trip, I said, “no churches filled with brutal Renaissance art.”  However, several churches, and a couple of castles we visited, made me want to go back ASAP.  I also delighted in every piece of art we happened upon.  So much for “best-laid plans” and “famous last words.” 

A line from Elizabeth Bishop’s 1956 poem, Questions of Travel, speaks to an important query; “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”  Actually, I had stayed at home and thought of Europe, pondering if my ancestral homeland was somehow “home.”

For decades before traveling there, I watched movies, documentaries and travel shows set in Europe, studied European culture, cooked European food, and pictured myself wandering Europe.  Then, I went.  The compulsion to go back doesn’t leave me while I continue to read, and think of “there.”

I read somewhere a paradox that we can simultaneously be both a masterpiece and a work in progress.  Maybe one day, home and travel will converge. “Let it go.  Let it out.  Let it all unravel.  Let it free and it can be.  A path on which to travel.” -Michael Leunig

I’m no poet but don’t you know it; not a stanza extravaganza nor alliteration configuration.  But my thoughts ought naught be canceled.  Erased or disgraced….

I wish to cancel you.  Cancel who?

Cancel you!  Cancel culture?

Who are you?  Cancel-culture-vulture.

Offends me.  Or sends me.

Cancel reading.  Cancel seeding.

Hit the ceiling.  Hurt my feelings.

Cancel dinner.  Cancel lunch.

Next cancel breakfast.  I have a hunch.

Lash out.  Cash you out.

Cancel smart.  Cancel heart.

Freak out.  Speak out.

Been canceled.  Been banned.

Unfriended.  Befriended.

Don’t like history.  It feels wrong.

It should be better.  Could be better.

Cancel learning.  Cancel yearning.

Cancel potato.  Cancel fun.

Cancel kindness.  Cancel hope.

Cancel left.  Cancel right.

They piddle on the middle.  We wait not hate.

Sun rise.  Cancel compromise.

Powerful-cancel.  Elite-control.

Cancel thought.  Cancel reason.  Who can please ’em?

Cancel gender.  With agenda.

Cancel monuments.  Cancel history.

Cancel love.  And the One above.

Cancel freedom.  Cancel speech.

Cancel prayer.  Cancel care.

Cancel-hoards.  Cancel-words.

I don’t like you.  Cancel you.

I don’t know you.  Cancel who?

 

One does not have to be a food expert in order to engage in culinary travels.  Most travel makes food procurement mandatory.  Some of it is nothing to write home about.

Travel food, one of the highlights of the adventure, tends to define a place for the foreign traveler, in particular.  Foreign food is rife with cultural misinterpretation, and subjective taste. 

Some of my food expectations when traveling have made the experience bewildering. For example, when in France, I thought we should eat “French food.”

The best food we ate in Paris was, oiled and seasoned haricot-verte (stick-thin, whole green beans) from an Italian deli. I still regret sticking to my preconceived notions about foreign dining, when we could have probably enjoyed an awesome meal in the Italian restaurant below that deli in Paris.

We found an inexpensive German-made chocolate bar while meandering through a Parisian neighborhood grocery; wishing later that we had bought several.  This compares sadly to the little box of overpriced Belgian chocolates from a specialty shop in, yes, Belgium, that had the same icky mystery filling of any old U.S. boxed chocolates.

In Finale Liguria, Italy, where my Italian was understood with a Canadian accent, the strawberry gelato from a beach-side shop, was so delectable that I quickly learned the correct enunciation, gelato alla fregola, to get it again behind a long line of other quick learners.  This contrasts with the truly boring pasta in Verona, Italy that I could have made better at home.

Both a language issue and a revelation about my husband, was the tuna pizza at a hotel restaurant in northern Italy.  I was too weary to consult the phrase book for our pizza selection so we winged-it.  It was Italy, it was pizza, what’s to screw up?

When you’re thinking pizza toppings, does tonno sound to you like it might translate to tomatoes?  To this overtired brain, it did.  Well, it doesn’t mean tomatoes, it means tuna.  Who puts tuna on pizza?

The look on my husband’s face when our tuna pizza arrived was priceless.  Understand that this man is known for trying almost any food.

His response was something like the full-body-spasm that precedes throwing up, rising from the stomach, through the diaphragm, the esophagus and into the facial muscles.  I’d never seen this reaction to food in decades of marriage to this man.  In all fairness, our cats probably would have walked away from that pizza.

The next food-like and language observation was along the autobahn in Germany.  I’m not a potty-joke kind of person, but this one has to be told.

We’re comfortable with the romance languages, rooted in Latin (French, Spanish, Italian), but German is way out of our comfort zone.  Highway signs in particular were difficult for us to comprehend, especially because they came too fast for this navigator to grab the phrase book and translate.  But, one German highway word that we will never forget is, Ausfahrt, which means exit.  We snort-laughed for miles at that one.

Language mistakes have to constitute some of the funniest mistakes a person can make.  Add a language mistake to a travel-weary-food conundrum and you might just have a stand-up comedy routine. 

This brings me to the Mantisse, a chocolate-filled muffin that we discovered in McDonald’s restaurants throughout France.  I fell in love with these things.  So, as we pulled up to a drive thru, our daughter asked her dad to order her favorite, crepes and I from the back seat this time, asked for a Mantisse.  It must have been one of our tired moments, because both of them swore I ordered, “mymanJesus.” 

I realize that it is a personal preference, and many of you will have your own, but we liked nary a restaurant meal that we tried in Europe.  Particularly disappointing was the grisly, chewy mystery meat special of the day that we tried at a road-side, mom-and-pop’s type restaurant, packed with regulars, in rural France.  The gravy/sauce though was wonderfully, stereotypically French.  Similarly, my Parisian plate of runny cheese sauce that was supposed to be shrimp ravioli, tasted like nothing, watered-down, and cost eight euros.

But the autobahn ham sandwiches, jambon-beurre, were perfection, as well as almost every market, deli, or food-truck, a la carte items we lived on (baguettes, cheese, pain au chocolat, grapes, etc.).  Middle-Eastern walk-ups of kabobs and gyros became a favorite destination from within small walled cities to mid-size towns, throughout the continent.  They also provided much coveted “French fries” to our daughter, under the English moniker, chips.  FYI potato chips in Europe, are crisps.

We periodically bought a case of bottled water at big grocery stores and kept it in our car trunk (boot, in our English, steering wheel on the right, rental).  But do you think we could get a bottle of “fizzy” water, gazeuse, in a French restaurant?  Later, we learned to ask for the most common brand name, Perrier.

Aboard the QEII and Queen Mary, we avoided our scheduled, formal meals, for which one had to dress formally.  We tried it once and the food was okay but not our cup of tea, get it, cup of tea, English formality….

However, the afternoon teas, complete with scones, cucumber sandwiches, etc., were nice enough; the chocolate chip cookies at the buffets were addictive; the Fish n Chips at the pub was everything the English tradition touts; and every buffet was true to its delicious stereotype, making thrice-daily walks on deck mandatory.

Finally, I will end this discussion of food and foreign travel with a cautionary tale.  Go prepared with your own over-the-counter remedies, such as Pepto-Bismol, Tylenol, antacids, etc.  There are green-crossed signs easily identifying pharmacies in every city in Western Europe but I dare you to find an over-the-counter item in there.  Nor are these items available in neighborhood groceries, or in what we know as dollar stores.

Bon voyage and bon apetit.    

The Lie of the Easy Access Phone Card, is my next tale of misadventure.  This one is a twofer.  It happened not once, but twice.  First, it was in the very same German destination as the Baden Baden ham experience from Memories of Travel.

This was 2008, before the ease of using cell phones between foreign countries and home had evolved.  We were told by travel experts at the time that the best way to phone home was to purchase a phone card at any neighborhood Tabac (Tobacco shop).

This is what we had done, in France on our way to Germany.  My husband thought he plugged in all the right numbers and codes to use the card from our nice German hotel.  So, he called his mom to chat about some highlights of the trip so far, for about twenty minutes.

The shock didn’t come until the next morning when I, alone, stood in front of a very stern, slim, dark-haired, middle-aged woman, demanding that I pay the phone charge of more than one hundred euros, which had been attached to our room bill of around two hundred euros.  My daughter and husband had gone to retrieve the car from the parking garage, so I stood alone in protest – “we used a phone card for that call,” to a solid response of – “that doesn’t work in Germany.”

“Okay,” this traveler nearly cried, as she shelled out more than three-hundred euros for that little misadventure.

This incident was followed a few days later by The Tale of the Norman Bates Hotel/Prison Scandal, which ended our attempts to call home using phone cards.  It was in France this time so we thought we’d emerge unscathed.  Not so much, but in a surprising caper.

We were tired and again, hungry.  We filled the car with gas and had to find a hotel soon.  It wasn’t rural and it wasn’t urban; maybe suburban industrialish would best describe the area.  We finally found a small, ranch style, U.S.-type homegrown motel.

It wasn’t great but it would do.  I think we picked up some food after getting gas, because we sat at picnic tables and ate outside the front valet area of the mostly deserted motel.  A few biker-type guests arrived and also meandered around outdoors.

Once more or less settled into our room, I had – after some struggle to get internet access, paid a bill via my laptop, and we planned to use our phone card at a pay phone in the hallway.  It took all three of us to figure out how to place that call to our friend who was manning our business and household affairs.

Lo and behold, we had locked ourselves out of our room.  I went to the front desk to beg for help and came upon the male manager, locking a metal grid across the desk area preparing to leave for the night.  What?

First, he yelled at me in and out of French, but reluctantly got us back into our room.  “Stupid Americans,” mumble mumble.  Second, we were essentially being locked into this hotel property with nobody remaining on sight from management.  Again, what?

There was a “back” door to the outside of our room and we stepped out, making sure we could get back in, to come and go to our car for bottled water and fruit, when we saw a gate had been closed to the property.  Twilight Zone music began to play in our heads – loudly.  I think we all jumped into bed and pulled the covers over our heads to quell the creepiness, at least until restless sleep took over.

Last in this series of tales is, The Tale of Your Teenage Daughter Hates You.  If you require reference material for this story, I will suggest two movies: 3 Days to Kill and European Vacation.

We thought it would be an epic coming of age, pre-graduation gift to our seventeen-year-old daughter, taking her to Europe.  Do you know the phrase, “it was the thought that counts?”  But now, many years down the road, the whole thing counts as a redacted, edited, and revisionist historical blessing to said daughter.

This tale is shared by way of teenager-daughter-dialogue which is not intended to elicit a response from her parents.  I think this is known as rhetorical speech.

“They have no internet service;” and the related, “I can’t get this dumb code to work.”

“I want French fries;” This is France, how hard could it be to find French fries in France?

“I have to pee;” “You want me to pee where?”  “You know that is a hole in the ground, not a                 restroom and there’s a man peeing against the wall in there?” and “Where do you put the toilet paper?”

“No!  I really mean it, NO!” – repeat – repeat – repeat….

Said teenager’s resounding no in Europe has become a yes in the telling of her own travel tales. “That was the worst meal, your spanakopita is better…, dad would have loved the feta with every meal….”

Staying inside her body like chickenpox, she had unknowingly caught the flu-like travel bug while still gestating in the womb, and it flares up periodically.  Her husband caught the bug from her, “when we were in Athens…, the beer in Germany….”

So, even the most negative of travel experiences imprint on one’s memories as life-enhancing travel tales.