…of many different peoples and worlds.
Dad, for most of his life, has been a pillar and a magnet for friendless people. Gentle and untiringly invested in his numerous relationships, many of which are even more unusual than his animals, he is the perpetual recipient of the beloved animals of his friends. When they can no longer care for or house their pets, they are delivered with tearful ceremony into the hands of a man who cannot bring himself to say no. Dad is clay in the hands of such trust.
Now I think, “If we’d be staying longer, we’d be so much better at this.”
A week ago at this hour, we descended into the bewildering masses of Dhaka city, the capital of Bangladesh, and spent a weary day whiling away the time and supporting our exhausted toddler till we could go to bed… about the time our Canadian bodies wanted to wake up. A week later, matters have improved.... Continue Reading →
Three years and a week ago, Charles and I left for a month of traveling in Bangladesh and India. Today we are leaving again. For Bangladesh. In the last eleven years, I have made this trip nine times. I don’t mind doing it again. At all. But I’m glad the packing is over. I’ll take... Continue Reading →
For me, traveling is a concerted effort directed at achieving what often turns into an underwhelming experience of more of the same old world. All of this I embrace for the delight of the occasional unexpected discovery and the calm pleasure of encountering a part of the world that is home to somebody else. I learn so much about myself in the concentrated drama of travel that can be lost in the slower undulations of life at home.
Charles, fearing lest he should gain a reputation for the peripheral things about his personality that I so dearly love to write about, suggested that I should write about he, his brothers, and airplanes... something interesting, he said, not meaning the brothers but the airplanes.
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