Grand Love

Another of my favorite lady travellers: Beryl de Zoete -- "Married in 1902, she and her husband Basil de Selincourt practiced celibacy and vegetarianism. She knew that her marriage had broken down when her husband brought home another woman and began eating beefsteak." So she started to travel.

A strong argument against marital celibacy would be the number of times I heard about the influence of a grandparent this summer.

First, there was my neighbor on the flight from Istanbul to Dushanbe. He was traveling for work with a medical supply company that had an office in Dushanbe. His tales of being in Dushanbe three years before included washing his hair with bottled water and no electricity. When I asked him if he thought it was better now, he said, "Let's see." with a cat-like grin on his face. (For the record, I experienced none of that.) He'd grown up in Holland and then immigrated back to Lebanon as a teenager with his family, gone to Canada for school, and then moved to Belgium for work. When he learned I was from the U.S., he said his grandfather had gone to Michigan around the time of World War II, leaving his family in Lebanon. He worked there for seventeen years sending money home and trying to earn enough to bring them to the U.S, but he died before he could. My row-mate said he still had letters his grandfather had sent, and that now his own sister lived in Michigan. So in a way, the family made it there after all.

Mimi told me early on about her grandmother. We were waiting at a carwash cafe sipping on Sprite at a little table with cages of blue and yellow parakeets behind us. The mist from the hoses brought little puffs of relief from the heat. Mimi smokes long, thin cigarettes that smell like apples; she's always careful to blow the smoke away from me, but when the wind picks it up and brings it back on occasion, it's like sitting in a cloud of potpourri. She likes to practice her English as much as possible so I told her I'd show her how I wanted to start my first class using pictures of my family to introduce myself. She listened and then started to share about her own family in an unbroken narrative like she'd been waiting for the chance. Her mother and father had always worked. Her mother had run the only local movie theater during Soviet times. This left Mimi to care for her sister, who was 9 years younger. It was her grandmother, she said, who had taught her to be a good person, to be polite, not to show anger, and this one sticks out, not to scream during labor.

Ella's grandfather helped her get a driver's license. And when she couldn't agree with her father on what to study in college (her choice was architecture), she got a job instead at a grocery store so she didn't have to study something she didn't want to. And it was her grandfather who would push his grocery cart over near the fish counter to watch her from a distance with pride.