Zekavat Trip, Post #1
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
I did a thing this spring, took a leap of faith.
Now that my children are launching their own lives, time flows differently than it did when my primary focus was mothering. I find myself randomly picking up paused strands of my life — fragments of memory, forgotten interests. But lately, I realize I am not picking them up haphazardly, but rather serendipitously. The threads have sweetly been waiting for me, shimmering exactly where I set them down years ago. For example, last summer I started dancing again after finding a modern dance class that I love, and I noticed that my camera doesn’t judge me when I sheepishly return to her and take her out to shoot a little. That’s the beauty of serendipity — no judgement, just wishes and chances.
At the beginning of this past school year, our head of school asked us to write bucket list items anonymously on a slip of paper, explaining that she would collect and then share them again at the end of the year.
I wrote my intentions, and then they skittered off to the recesses in my mind almost as soon as I had written them and handed the slip back. Like all school years, last year was filled with complexity and overwork, and from time to time, I had a vague memory of promising myself to start that bathroom reno project, but those thoughts slipped away too.
Around Presidents’ Day, an email that had been hanging around my inbox since November kept gnawing at me, peck-peck-pecking its way to the top of my consciousness even amid the chaos of the school year. I kept opening and re-reading the email, which was an invitation to apply for an annual travel grant offered at my school. The Zekavat Family Summer Sabbatical offers support for teachers to travel in order to pursue areas of personal interest, with hopes that they will find the experience personally rewarding and that the seeds of their explorations will continue to bloom at Moorestown Friends School, where I teach.
I had to admit to myself that I did have a germ of an idea for a trip proposal. I had recently re-watched the movie Midnight in Paris, and it reminded me of a college course I had taken called “Four Cities and Modern Literature.” In the movie, the main character Gil Pender goes back in time to 1920s Paris and meets modernist artists and writers like Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes. In my college course, we had read novels and plays by modernist writers from Dublin, London, Paris, and Berlin. There was a connection here …
The deadline was rapidly approaching; though I was underwater with work and overwhelm, and I was not at all sure how to make sense of my loosely connected ideas, something compelled me to apply. I had help and encouragement from some fine folks (they know who they are), and I managed to pull a proposal together.
The basic pitch was to visit the cities and to be my own version of a Gil Pender. In the college course, we had read works by authors from those cities, like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Andre Breton, Alfred Jarry, and Bertold Brecht, but I wanted to go beyond the course using an interdisciplinary lens and learn about modernist dancers, artists, publishers, journalists, and designers like Isadora Duncan, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, and many others. Additionally, because these four cities were hubs of creative energy, they attracted a lively American expat community that included the names just mentioned and also artists like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. I wanted to go on walking tours and to visit cafes and museums to get a taste of modernist Europe and to begin to understand why I feel so deeply connected to this movement and this period in time.
When I got the nod for the trip, I was thrilled, but what I didn’t realize was, as scary as it felt to write the proposal, it was even scarier to have it approved. It came at the most hectic time of the school year, and I had no time to research the trip logistics, let alone the more scholarly aspects I had promised to explore. I barely had time to book lodgings and only did so when a family member told me I had better get to it.
Two days before I left I was still scrambling to finish up a long list of end-of-year school tasks and feeling like I had no idea what to do or where to go in each city.
I kept frantically checking emails and tried to get everything done. In the midst of the flurry, my head of school sent back our bucket list from the beginning of the year. I laughed when I saw the email and almost didn’t open it, thinking, “Bah, I didn’t do a single thing about that bathroom,” and I berated myself a bit for not having started the long-overdue project. But still, I decided to open the email.
I found my contribution right away:
After re-reading my wishes a couple of times, I just barely, finally, remembered setting the first intention to paper and had that eerie feeling of meeting myself on the road.
It finally sunk in. It was just about time to travel.