Tickets Home and Back to Quoting Welty

A couple nights ago I bought one way tickets back to my midwestern homeland.

Not staying there forever - just hit a fare sale that was too good to pass up. We couldn't drive to Indiana for the cost of these tickets for 7 of us. Travel won't take place until late June and return fares weren't published for July yet; hence, the one way option.  I was hesitant to hit the purchase button, but my husband sat down with me to do some calculations on drive-time/cost of gas/various options for return travel, which convinced me to commit to flying out to Indiana for our summer vacation.  We also plan to visit his family in Oklahoma, like we have done for all but one of the past 17 years.

Options for the return to CA?  If cheap fares show up, we may fly, but the most likely option is that my husband will drive out. He can't be gone from work as long as I would like to be gone (although he's still planning to be gone over a week, which is longer than some husbands are willing to leave their jobs), so we'll fly ahead, and he'll join us for the Fourth of July holiday and the drive home. Yes, this means that we will still have pay for the gas to drive out, but his food and hotel stay will be cheaper than ours. And for him to spend three days alone in the car will be like a vacation, compared to three days in the car with 7 kids, one of whom will only be about 3 months old.

The idea is a little convoluted and still not the least expensive option, which would be driving, nor the most expensive, which would be flying everywhere.  My practical conscience wants to question why we are committing to this trip when we have other expenses looming (tuition! car repairs! college!), while the voice of my romantic self asks, "Why the same thing every year? Think of the places you could visit instead of going to see family..." These locations aren't destinations featured in travel magazines in articles about places to see before you die.

That voice was sympathetic to the discussion we had last weekend over one of the best dinners I've had in a while at a fish restaurant with my brother- and sister-in-law.  Eating good food seems to make good conversation flow more easily.  I had wild California halibut and roasted brussel sprouts, which thinking of now makes me hungry. So often we go to a restaurant and leave slightly disappointed, but this was not the case. I only sampled the wine, but it was good, too, and no one offered to share another sip of their glass with me.

The discussion? One we've had before (and one I've written about a few times): The in-laws' argument was that travel makes you a better person; my husband and I maintain you don't need to travel in order to have an understanding heart and a curious mind.  The talk came up based on our experience in Guam.  As much as we loved our island life, I don't know whether I can say it made me a better person.  We couldn't get a handle on what "better" means, for one thing. Better than we were before? Better than someone else? Better in what way?  There are saints who never went anywhere and villains who have circled the globe.  There are people who are kindhearted and understanding who haven't left the community they grew up in.  And then there's the lady down the street who has been on 79 cruises, but you wouldn't guess it except she has a great tan. The missionary and the hedonist both travel.

Certainly the tourist industry wants you to believe that going to Bali will make you a better person, or a happier one, at least. But I remember feeling absolutely miserable one night when we were in the Caribbean after my husband and I had had an argument, where we supposed to be having this wonderful bonding time and I never felt more distant.

At the dinnertable, we played devil's advocate and argued long and hard against the notion that you NEED to travel to appreciate the world and its people. It's a falsehood to think you can understand a culture after a visiting a place for a few days, a few weeks, even a few months.

On the other hand, I do understand the desire to experience places and people first hand. I'm drawn in by Travel magazine's 10 Most Fabulous Places Ever.  As much as I love going to the airport and getting on a plane, I also have felt the letdown after arriving someplace far away and finding out it isn't so different after all, not as foreign and exotic as I had hoped.  But then I've also been surprised to find out how foreign some places that aren't really so far away feel (New Orleans?).  Dissonance is a part of the pleasure of vacationing.

And I agree that travel does change you.  How much more meaningful our trip to Rome for Mother Teresa's beatification and Blessed John Paul II's 25th anniversary as pope was compared to the trip to Japan.  In Rome, we were pilgrims. The focus of the trip was on sharing our faith with the thousands of other pilgrims in the city, but we also visited and prayed at sites and paintings and churches we had studied and read about.  We had a purpose for the trip, and it changed the way I feel about Mother Teresa and the former Pope.  In Japan we were tourists.  I had my guidebook handy at all times.  We didn't understand the significance of much of what we saw because we didn't understand the history.  We didn't know who many of the shrines we saw we dedicated to.  But I have to admit that trip did alter my imagination of Japan. It made me more curious about the place and its people.  And as a family vacation it was unforgettable.

The problem is that there are just too many places and not enough time.  And conversion - and good conversation - can happen anywhere - no need to travel to change your life.  Stepping away from the everyday is useful, but you don't have to go far, especially where we are located, with mountains a few miles to the east, an ocean minutes away to the west, and giant sequioas waiting for us a few hours north.

But our first priority is to spend time with people we love.  That time grows shorter as our kids and parents age.  Sometimes vacationing with family can be an emotional drain, but no one we met in Japan on our week's vacation is going to come to our funerals and pray for our souls.  My kids spend more time looking at photo albums of time with their cousins than any of our vacations. Surely to be known and loved is better than to be well-traveled, if you have to make a choice.  So again we adjust our compass by the lodestone of "home."

Hence, the poignancy of Eudora Welty's words from her essay on place I quoted last time, worth recopying since she is more eloquent than I.  If I had had the book handy at the restaurant, perhaps I would have pulled this out:

 "The open mind and the receptive heart -- which are at last and with fortune's smile the informed mind and the experienced heart -- are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways." 

So the reason why we touch base with our blood ties - the place and the people -  when we can: those blood ties define us and teach us to find meaning.  We have to love those people and places, even if they aren't the most beautiful in the world or the easiest to get along with. If love is always easy, we can't really know what it means to love. Welty quotes Faulkner in her essay on time in fiction to explain why we need our memories and need to understand our past and our ancestors:

"Remembering is so basic and vital a part of staying alive that it takes on the strength of an instinct of survival, and acquires the power of an art. Remembering is done through the blood, it is a bequeathment, it takes account of what happens before a man is born as if he were there taking part. It is a physical absorption through the living body, it is a spiritual heritage. It is also a life's work.
 "'There is no such thing as was,' Faulkner remarked in answer to a student's question as to why he wrote long sentences. 'To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment in action , is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him; and the long sentence ... is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something...'"  

And so I think that returning to see our families is an imperative, despite expense and inconvenience. I want my children to know who their people are, to know more about themselves.  I can't tell them all the stories.  If because of our transient life, they don't have one place to call home, they will have these blood ties. 

...  "There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes -- closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed."

There are many beautiful places in the world, many places we daydream about visiting or living after retirement from the military.  But the familiar is what is most beautiful.  When we move around, it sometimes takes me weeks and months to become fond of a place. I have to learn to know it.  And perhaps that's why going away/traveling is valuable; it allows us to appreciate the known more when we return and return and return - the ongoing conversion.