I’m a confessed Anglophile, my loyalty second only to Europe as a whole. When I graduated college, I backpacked around the United Kingdom with a girlfriend, and a year later, I returned with a group of friends for two more weeks. I love English gardens, my favorite movies and books tend to be set somewhere in the British Empire, and of course, I still dream of a white owl delivering an acceptance letter to Hogwarts. High on my travel list is a month in a rental car, winding backcountry roads in summertime with the family. I want to visit the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Yorkshire, head up to Scotland’s Isle of Skye and the Shetland Islands, touch base in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. I want to nibble on scones in Canterbury. And now? I want to visit unassuming, unknown Felixstowe.
Back home, wherever that is, I’ll display my heavyweight silver pitcher. Its engraving, front and center, will equally remind me that I’ll never see it all, all the places people call home, where they shop for bread and what they eat for dinner. Rosebery Felixstowe is home to someone else, and I’d like to see it, firsthand. What’s the street of Rosebery like? My pitcher will be in my American home, waving its English flag and reminding me to get back out.
Two days before our flight back to the States, we spend the afternoon in Hyde Park, a green haven in the midst of the city. The kids need to run, Kyle and I need to rest, and we all need to chat, one last time, about our trip’s end. The kids play for hours on the pirate ship at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, and Kyle and I take turns napping. Near dinnertime, we gather our jackets for a final stroll through the grass.
“All right, kids,” Kyle says as they climb up a log, “favorite park you played at this year?”
“This one!” declares Finn, little thought beyond the present.
“Hmm . . .” Tate pauses for a moment. “I think the park in Germany, the one with the supersteep slides.”
“Oh yeah—that’s my favorite!” Finn says.
“Where was that one park with all the tree logs stuck together, like a jungle gym treehouse?” Reed asks.
“That was Strasbourg, in France,” I say.
“Okay. Then that one’s my favorite,” he decides.
We can mark time on the trip by playgrounds. Princess Di’s memorial playground is our last stop, and before this, there was the creative conglomeration of logs in Strasbourg, France, more art than child’s plaything. Before that was the modern decagon in the courtyard of our apartment in Innsbruck, Austria. There was the Bavarian theme park in the woods, of course, and before that, our well-loved neighborhood park in Turkey, where the swings still dragged too close to the ground. The kids played in the microscopic play space at the restaurant in Kosovo, where Kyle and I first flirted many years ago, and the Zagreb airport’s outdoor playground was a surprise during a layover in Croatia. In Jinja, Uganda, the kids climbed the wooden fort at Sole Hope’s guesthouse, and back in Queensland, Australia, they splashed in a park of hoses and sprinklers to soak off December sweat. The airport in Singapore had several playgrounds worthy of awards, naturally, and in Chiang Mai, we lived by a play structure full of old tires and chains, perfect for climbing. Before that, in Hong Kong, we wandered a park with an aquarium and a bamboo-hungry panda, and at our friend’s apartment in Xi’an, China, the neighborhood kids met in the courtyard to climb monkey bars while elderly neighbors made laps on the sidewalk.
“Hey—do you remember all that exercise equipment on the streets in Beijing?” Tate asks as we head back to our guesthouse in Camden Town, where we’ll start packing for the last time.
“What exercise equipment?” Reed asks.
“You remember. All those twisty machines and stuff we played on,” she says.
“That was for exercising?” Reed says, surprised. “I thought those were playgrounds.” China has a penchant for exercise machines, free to the public and lined along urban sidewalks.
“That was a long time ago, at the beginning of our trip,” Kyle muses, picking up a rock in the grass. “Back when we were still getting over jet lag. We’ve done a ton of stuff since then.”
“Oh yeah, remember how Finn woke up in the middle of the night, looking through the empty fridge in Beijing?” Tate asks. “And how he was so tired he was talking in his sleep?”
“I don’t remember that!” Finn says. “What did I say?”
“Bananas!” Reed says. They double over with laughter.
“Come on guys,” I say, grabbing Kyle’s hand. “We’ve got a big flight coming up. Let’s go make dinner so we can get a decent bedtime.”
Turkish Dust
Twenty layers of civilization park beneath parking lots, Each dusted by feet of descendants.
You’ve played on the broken-free columns
Sarcophagus in shambles, a keen spot for play We dance on the dead, we’re alive longer and stronger.
Take this, all this,
And take none of it for granted.
We walk hallowed halls and
You play on Corinthian columns
And soon we are like them.
Dust.
Art, marble, music worldwide splay glory in remembrance That this, this too, shall all pass, as with us Collected into glory like them.
Renewed.
We set out one day more,
One foot in front of another
And another, and another,
Around the bend, in awe of it all.
Earth is, after all,
crammed with heaven.
PART VI
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
—Pat Conroy
22
RETURNING
Benedictine monks take, among other vows, a vow of stability. In it, they promise to stay in the monastic community in which they enter, and to not move unless they’re sent elsewhere by their superiors. They stay put. If this idea was so radical during Benedict’s sixth-century Italian life that it called for a monastic vow, imagine how utterly antithetical this idea is to our frenetic, whirlwind twenty-first-century society. I can’t imagine the possibility of this kind of rootedness.
Six in ten adults move to a new community at least once in their lives, and the average length of a job is only 4.4 years now. Smartphones, Wi-Fi, toll roads, and commuter jets make it a cinch for modern-day nomads to work from anywhere and take their lives on the road. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily; the average Western adult has a range and reach that Benedict and his followers could not fathom a thousand years ago. We can visit lifesaving doctors the next state over; we can surprise our mother on her birthday across the country; we can interview for a new job stationed a thousand miles away before we say yes to it.
For those of us who can take our work wherever we go, contemporary infrastructure paves the road to geographical freedom. We can check e-mail from a chaise longue on a Thai beach. We can Skype with our boss from an Austrian coffee shop. Our work deadlines are dependent only on a decent Internet connection and foresight to calculate the time difference. Add worldschooling to the mix, and the whole family can be anywhere, together.