Living the dream

I had a dream when I was a kid. A literal, “I’m asleep” kind of dream, that is. This isn’t an inspirational post. In it, I’m swimming along the bottom of the pool, my favorite place in all of Childhood’s Kingdom, when I realize I can breathe down there. Not fully, not well, but if I calm down and do it just right, modestly, I can breathe. I remember an infusion of calm and an understanding that everything could be fantastic. Could be better than I’d known to hope for. (It wasn’t until later that I suspected I’d just rolled over and was breathing through my pillow.)

Amsterdam welcomed me my first day

This morning I’m coming up for air. After 21 days of Best of Europe tour-guiding, I’m waking up to a day without appointments, no reservations to confirm or information to convey. Not even a city to depart.

The street is polite vespas and well-dressed Parisians, nothing on my plate but baguette crumbs and the promise of more good food to come, perhaps after a stroll by the Seine? And I remember that dream. Its epiphany that I can do something I really enjoy and get the air I need while doing it. And I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 days.

Swiss Alpine calm

I’ve been swimming, diving into Amsterdam’s historic harbor before turning up the Rhine to reach Austrian Alpine passes, waterfalling down Roman roads to muse about Venetian canals before making my way through old Florence to reach older Rome, just to smile and drift up into Swiss glaciers, a liquid core of calm that persists when I slide down through the vineyards of Burgundy to wash up fully rational on Seine shores.

And I’ve been breathing.

Water was an element of my boyhood joy, and travel is essential for my adult satisfaction. Sharks and me, stop moving and we suffocate. But it’s not a compulsion, not addiction, neither distraction nor delusion. It’s adoration. Adulation. Celebration of our worldwide nation and the strokes that pull us all together.

Islam is supposed to be scary? Me and
the little girl don't buy it. You?

For years I traveled. Helpless before my vagabond urges. It was right for a time, but wrong in the end. Insufficient for the long term, serving nothing but my whims. Now there’s a purpose to my travel. In a world of multimedia capitalists who profit from our fear, who compete for the spectacles that widen our eyes and shrink our horizons, I find something more worthy than mere movement when I take others with me, show them these faces of beauty left here by centuries of human struggle and millennia of natural process.

For twenty one days spread across half a dozen countries we delight in the reality of the places, rooms in our global house, and I watch the tension of the first day dissolve into the ease of the last. Day One I see apprehension when I show them the train track that will reliably bring them home, Day Twenty I drop them off in Paris’s elegant metro maze and say “See you tomorrow” and they’re off without a pause.

And in the calm, when they don’t need me at all, I can imagine them going home, feeling merely tired, to be greeted by the anxious homebound with their pinched brows who desperately inquire “You were in Europe? But weren’t you worried? Didn’t you feel unsafe?”

And in my daydream I see their calm smile, perhaps wearing the appropriate regret for the incidents of the moment, but underneath is the deep understanding that the world is something other than the misconception made up by those make-up talking heads. And my traveling companions ease back to a full library of happy moments, warm welcomes, beautiful humanity and they can shrug off the constipated clench of petty terror. Stories they know better than to buy, now.

Think they wish they'd spent more time fearful and divided?

No, they didn’t feel unsafe. They felt free. If I did my job right. And the memory of every one of their smiles resonates within me, and I feel that dream’s sense of delighted astonishment, astonished delight, and can pull in deep lungfuls of fresh air.

Maybe it’s an inspiration post after all. For me, anyway.

Europe's normalcy and hospitality are waiting, on every boulevard and back street.

Community of strangers, on one last night in Rome

I'm developing...not traditions. Not rituals. Habits. I'm developing habits, perhaps tendencies, at different points of these current trips and travels.

Before coming home, I tend to eat my last dinner at a sub-par restaurant, invariably in a city known for its delicious cuisine. Pizza by the slice in Paris. A pasta place in Rome that waits until I sit down to begin breaking my rules. (The non-Italian hustler talking people into coming in must have been in the WC when I arrived.) After weeks of great food, I have to stumble at the finish line.

I get up on time, with eagerness in limbs not fully rested, and take a thorough shower. I've saved one entirely clean shirt, like gold by that point, an aspiration for the most pristine pre-travel hygienic state possible. I will NOT subject my neighbor to Traveler Armpit, nor arrive stinking and disheveled! Then I walk to public transit, and arrive soaked in sweat, ready to ferment for 12 transatlantic hours, wearing my soggy garb and a rueful smile at the familiarity of it all.

I also book an extra night's accommodation so that I'll have time to go over end-of-tour paperwork and processes with the other guide, only to watch them depart immediately for their next gig. So I spend a day with myself, listening to the music of my headphones and the recriminations of my head at further delaying my return to the arms that are waiting for me. And I walk. I walk past the sights I will someday show, and the sights I have not yet seen. I find a museum I should know about, and a restaurant I can comfortably forget.

With fealty to no schedule, I stop and watch the chestnut vendors, islands of desperate stillness among the casual frenzy of the crowd. I stroll the intermittent museum of city walls and subway tiles, their art that says things more modern than most masters. Feeling minimal membership with the tourist mob, I find myself harboring feelings of kinship with the vendors, milking a living from the gargantuan teat of tourism. They flick their flimsy lights and hawk their imitation purses, ready to run if they see the gray uniforms of the Guardia di Finanza, having already run from the camouflaged terror and violence of their homelands.

They have a community these men, since men they nearly always are. (What happened to their women? Where were they left?) They have formed a new edition of an ancient tradition, society's subtext of foreigners who do not pertain, but belong anyway. I find these men fascinating, annoying in their machinations and beautiful in the tragedy of their existence, maybe hopeful in the pursuit of their own salvation. I can not imagine their lives. And I assume they cannot imagine mine.

When my eyes have seen enough, and feet have walked too much, I return to that last night of foreign home, on sheets I won't have to wash, and sleep my waiting sleep, filled with gratitude for the Home to which I can return.