The Trip Home from Rome

Woke up in my own bed this morning. Talk about luxury. Talk about simplicity! I lay awake watching the low-spreading red glow rise outside my eastern bedroom window. Gorgeous, that unfolding of shape and substance outside my window. Glorious unfolding of light on the east side of the trees -- a red-yellow brightening that slowly opened the woods to my eager eyes. God: I love this beautiful home in the woods beside the pond. Nancy's place. The place and time where I belong. . .where I once loved and was loved.

Glad to be home.

STILL: I soooo enjoyed the trip to Romania, and absolutely delighted in our Roman adventure. But coming home, finding all well here, feeling Gatsby-kitty snug again in my lap as I finger my computer keyboard -- neat stuff. Reflecting upon the trip and all its small-miracles is a sort of unexpected and wonderful after-trip-boost. I've never been much of a traveler. It's more my style to glory in the familiar and common-place.

Don't laugh. For most of us, the real challenge of every day is the development of an ongoing rich-sense-of-the moment, a sort of quietly-ever-present-newness that unfolds and astonishes the perceptive observer.

Terrible though it has been, my grieving has taught me the value of living in the present moment. I'm aware that one way grieving and aging have changed me is that I seldom look FORWARD. I pay attention to the PRESENT. And I think often of the good days of my PAST.

So it is, I've come to see the present moments melt into each other, while the FUTURE seems remote and of little interest. As my much-honored 101 year old aunt told me recently: "Rich as our pasts have surely been, there's really only this moment, Bob. Treasure these moments as they fly away. . . ."

Change is both minute and constant. Attention must be paid. That is the price of loving any time and place, of loving any person.


I'd like to tell you about my trip. And though it may seem strange, I choose to begin with a few details about my coming home. For, as much as I loved the trip, its stirring sights and sounds, the vitality of Romania and Rome, the challenge of the travel and the decisions we made -- as much as I loved all this, I am surprised at how coming home has stirred me.

While I may appear aging and amply seasoned: I am NOT a seasoned traveler. You get me to a place, I know how to enter in and enjoy. But traveling -- from making reasonable travel arrangements, to following a well-planned itinerary, to orienting a map and launching out in the logical and preferred direction and finding my way back -- this sort of problem-solving drives me crazy.

In fact, if you want to know where we are on a map, and which direction to walk to the next desired monument (or whatever), then just ask me to point in the direction I think will get us there. Then launch out in the OPPOSITE direction. You will then always find your desired location. North, south, east, or west? Nope! I usually know UP or DOWN. But only if I stumble and fall.

However: I always know the way home -- be it the hotel after a long sojourn to multiple tourist sites (in the course of a day) or back to my woods. There is within me, it seems, an inner compass. It is not so much that I find my way unerringly home. It is, rather, that home draws me to it. I can feel "home" drawing near. Distances going away seem long. Travel away, takes longer than does coming home.

I will tell you in later postings how my grandson-in-law Mat kept the map and led us unerringly to our tourist locations. In this posting I will tell you how by luck and lunk-headed decision-making I blundered safely home.

The first leg was easy. Mat piled me into a taxi, jumped in beside me, and guided me safely to the airport in Timisoara (Romania), roughly a 30-minute trip. I could tell by his repetitive questions that he felt he was casting me hopelessly away -- surely I would be lost in the world. "Grampa: in which pocket is your passport?" (at least 15 times?) "Where is your itinerary?" (another 15 times?). "Where have you stowed your Hilton Hotel reservation confirmation for when you arrive in Chicago?" (only 10 times: clearly I was getting smarter.) "Remember, Grampa: Keep your wallet in your left front pocket. . . ." (Maybe six times.) On and on. . . .

What, pray tell, does it disclose about my personality that such a fusillade of questions makes me feel loved, rather than imbecilic? The questions also heartened me, because most of the time I knew the answers.

The Timosaura flight took me safely to Munich -- I mean, how could I get out of the plane? Munich was a little tougher. I had to find my gate, find a bathroom, and seek reassurance that the plane (to Chicago) was on time -- stuff like that. For some reason, every functionary greeted me in a solicitous and reassuring manner -- could've been my inane smile, my silver hair, and my quiet inquiries once I locked onto their eyes. More likely, I reminded each airline official of his or her own dangerously incompetent, yet engaging grampa.

From Munich to Chicago -- a ten-hour flight. My granddaughter Marisa -- who feared that if I didn't move about frequently, I would surely develop blood-clots in my legs which would then break free and lodge in my brain -- made me promise to get up and walk around at least once every two hours. That took considerable creative energy. (How many times can you go to the lavatory?) Besides which, those perambulations interrupted my reading and my viewing of Avatar.

Plus various attractive, female flight attendants kept asking me stuff like "Can I help you SIR?" I wanted to respond with something like "When I get to the point I can't pee on my own, I'll blow my brains out. . . ." But I slipped away each time with a simple "No Thank You!" Actually, I didn't need to pee five times. Still, where else could I go, but to the lavatory, whether I had to go or not?

By the way: nothing is more deflating to an aging male than being called Sir by attractive young females -- be they family or not -- especially when said aging male is presumably on the way to the lavatory.

Half a book, one serviceable meal, a short nap, five bogus trips to the bathroom, and most of Avatar got me to Chicago blood-clot and stroke free.

Chicago was a little tougher. O'Hare's an immense place -- FIVE TERMINALS. Daylight saved me though: once I got onto the shuttle, I could plainly see the Hilton looming toward me in the distance. Because a number of my flights had been canceled, I had eighteen hours to kill. So I took a luxurious shower, changed into my last remaining clean clothing, found a restaurant for a quick supper, then wandered back onto the shuttle, determined to find the terminal and gate of my afternoon flight back to Bay City.

I took a five circuit ride clear around O'Hare -- just for the sheer pleasure of riding someplace free. I assumed a light-hearted and cosmopolitan manner, a sort of Don't mind me: I know EXACTLY where I'm going posture, if you will. Thank goodness for theater training.

It was by sheer accident, on the second time around the circuit, that I blundered out of the shuttle and stumbled right into a map of the entire terminal, complete with a list of the airlines served by each terminal. (What will they think of next?!) Not quite trusting my good luck -- and completely disbelieving the map -- I completed the circuit and found a computer terminal which printed out the boarding pass I'd need the next morning. Amazingly simple: slipped my credit-card into the slot, thereby identifying myself to the computer, and out popped the pass, complete with all the information I'd need in the morning.

Apparently, O'Hare has designed a fail-safe system for aging idiots just like me.


Feeling all grown-up and cosmopolitan, I retraced my steps to the Hilton, arranged a late-morning wake-up call, and promptly fell asleep in the huge bed. Around noon the next day I arrived at my gate cooler than George Clooney (in Up in the Air -- or whatever it is exactly).

Notwithstanding my flight was twice delayed for short periods, I was soon sorting ten-days of dirty laundry and poking the first load into my very own washer, in my very own utility room.

Man! Am I GOOD-or-WHAT?


Next time I'll tell you a little about Rome, the Vatican, the endless sculpture museum, and Mike's Sixteen Chapel (which is how I found it spelled on all the signs). And about the trim, black-suited Vatican guards who kept shushing us every time our astonished murmurs of delight became too irreverently audible as we stood transfixed gazing upward at the ceiling.

And other stuff, too.