NOT TO BE MISSED


The Park Monceau, the Jardins du Alfred Kahn
The little canal (not easy to find)
that follows the Seine.
Have peach melba at the Place Vendome;
Walk to Montmartre; see the street where I lived.
We carry the memories of others
Away with us like extra baggage
Scribbled on slips of paper, tucked
into the backs of guidebooks.
We cart the best view of Notre Dame,
a romantic spot where vows were exchanged,
the Pont Neuf at night,
that meal when figs were fresh from a tree,
the hotel with the feather mattress
that resembled a cloud.

Diligent as boy scouts
We have trudged;
Tried to retrace others' steps
Only to find the restaurant closed
Or the fois gras not to our liking
The gardens too precious and planned,
the peach melba too sweet.
At the Rodin we preferred to be outside
in the shade of chestnuts
Than inside, surrounded by ghostly heads.

We thought we knew our friends
and they knew us
and they knew we'd want
small gardens smelling of roses,
museums with delicate pastels,
a restaurant where we could linger
over our anisette.

We cannot sleep the night you didn't dream
or fall in love along a little quais,
taste meringues for the first time.
We cannot find the person you were
when you tossed your head back to laugh
before the tour buses arrived at Giverney.


When I think of all we failed to see -
a simple gesture, an angry look,
love whispered down alleyways,
The hours lost trying to reclaim
That perfect sip of Merlot.

Dutiful tourists
we tried not to miss a single thing
and now we have missed this
and so much more.

Mary Morris

Suggested Reading

Last night, after the recommendation of a friend, I began a novel set in Turkey, entitled THE SEA-CROSSED FISHERMAN by Yashar Kemal. Because I'm going to Turkey soon, I'd asked around for suggested reading. I actually had the book on my shelf, but had forgotten about it until this friend reminded me. As I was reading along, late into the night, I came to a passage that begins: "In the distance, sunk in shadow, its leaden domes, its minarets and buildings only vaguely discernible in the bluish haze, Istanbul was still asleep..." I've attached the page here, though I doubt you can read it. Still it struck a deep chord.

I think it was about 1:30 or 2a.m, but suddenly I perked up. This was the kind of passage I was waiting for. Something that took me out of my bedroom in Park Slope and put me half way around the world. I saw the haze. I heard the call to prayer. My journey had, at least in my mind, begun. This is one of the things I do whenever I'm going anywhere. I look for the stories and novels, the folktales and songs, films and food, whatever I can get my hands on to start getting my head ready for a trip. But nothing is as important to me as the books I read before or bring with me.

I'm not sure when this began, but I recall going to Greece with three books in my bag: THE ODYSSEY, ZORBA THE GREEK, and THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSI. (My dear Henry Miller again). I crossed Russia with ANNA KARENINA in my bag. I travel to Latin America with Marquez. I rarely recall what a guidebook said and I'm not so good at taking directions or remembering to go to somebody's favorite restaurant, but books. These I take with me. Jane Austen for England, Stendhal and Hugo for France. What a delight it is to reread THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME while relaxing on the Ile St. Louis. And on the other end of the political spectrum, I've read Lorca in Spain and Anne Frank's diary in Amsterdam.

This gives me a feel not only for the sights and the sounds, but the soul of a place. It is the writing by the people who live in and reflect upon their own culture that interests me; not what the travelers or guidebooks have to say. I suppose with Kindle or IPad or whatever digital reading device we will soon be using, this will all be easier. You can be in Mexico and pick up Octavio Paz or Cairo and find Mafouz at the touch of a finger tip. Or Klima in Prague.

But personally I like that process of finding and discovery and deciding which book will suit my mood. I like my way of sampling, browsing. Deciding what book to take where. I know I'll be a convert soon. I'll want to download THE PALACE WALK in case I've forgotten to pack it on my way to the pyramids or UNDER THE VOLCANO as I head back to Mexico. But I've enjoyed the process, the decision making. It's like figuring out which friends you want to travel with and for how long. But no matter what wherever I go, suggested reading goes with me.

Today at the bookstore a clerk recommended for Turkey A MIND AT PEACE BY Tanpinar. Not Pamuk, he said. Read Tanpinar. So I ordered it because this is the best way I know to really understand where I am or where I'm going to be.

After the Storm

During the Storm

Channeling Henry Miller

"Voyages are accomplished inwardly," Henry Miller wrote, I believe, in one of my favorite books of his - the Colossus of Marousi. "And the most difficult are made without leaving the spot." Whatever one thinks about Henry Miller he understood something about art and travel. The journey is inward before it is outward. The traveler and the artist must first conceive and prepare in their minds whatever it is they set out to do in the world.

My mother had her own take on this in 1967 when I sailed to Europe on the SSFrance. I can still see her, growing smaller and smaller as the boat moved from the pier and into New York harbor. I have a picture of her in fact, standing on the dock in sunglasses and a scarf on her head. Her parting words to me were, "Remember you take yourself with you wherever you go."

One of the things I admired about Miller was that he wrote and painted every day. It was his discipline. In Big Sur at the end of his writing time he painted. In the coffee table book on Miller there are pictures of him in his studio as his children run and play outside. Though I have issues with some of his writing, and I wonder if he is still read as he once was, there is a freedom to his work. He is an artist who could let himself go. And I have long admired his watercolors. What I think Miller was able to achieve was that freedom. He had a passion for travel, for writing, and for art.

Two years ago I went down to Mexico to study contour drawing with Sue Siskin. When she told me that she wanted me to channel Henry Miller, I knew I had come to a place where I would learn something. The town where she lived, La Manzanilla, had a large gringo population, but it was still a dusty, funky beachtown. It had its dark stories as well. Some boys who had been murdered at a nearby resort. But I learned from Sue to be a bug. To move the eye slowly across the contours of whatever it you are seeing.

When I think of Miller, I think of an artist who could completely let himself go. That is something, isn't it. It seems somehow hard to achieve. There are always bills to pay and other work to do. Meals to prepare and so on. But when Miller sat down to work, he pushed all of that aside. Ego, passion, ambition. Whatever it was, it is something any artist should strive to do. Miller moved through the world with the eyes of a child. Everything he saw or read or did, every day of his life, it was all fresh to him. It was new. Despite whatever we might think of him as a writer (or his views of women), he encompassed the spirit of the artist and and, for me anyway, has always been a source of inspiration.

Backtracking

Since I was a girl, wandering the woods around my house, I've never liked to backtrack. Even then I made a wide circle through the woods to the path along the lake, doubling back via the roads and ravines that made up the place I called home. In my childhood fantasies of pioneers (which were the first to settle the place where I dwelled on the bluffs above Lake Michigan), the trails only went one way. Mainly west.

I was in a sense a child of the West. The paths I took - there was no turning back. It is a kind of a joke now in my family. Larry knows I won't go back to a store where I forgot to pick up something. If I walk one way into the park, I have to walk another way home. I always feel defeated returning to where I've been, going back the way I came. I am not really sure when forward motion became my "thing."

I have always done better in motion. I prefer to read on a plane than in a chair. I prefer to write on trains than in the comfort of my own home. As a girl my father called me Pigeon because he said I never sat still. Whatever this trait is (and it may just be a biochemical imbalanace) the fact is if I can help myself, I don't like to go back. I rarely do.

Once years ago I was looking for a pen in my father's bedstand and I came upon a pile of maps. Now my father was someone who never went anywhere. He never wanted to so it was odd to find maps in his drawer. I took them out. They were all triple A, marked in blue markers. Some were of the routes he took to inspect the shopping centers he and his brother built. But the one that stood out showed a route north through Canada, across southern Ontario, Niagara Falls, to Boston where I went to school. And then it showed a route home through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. A circle, the kind I normally like to travel. Perhaps my father knew this. It was one of the only times that I felt he may have wanted a small adventure.

But the sad part about this map was that I never did complete it. I never went back. I never returned. If anything I only moved farther and farther away. I am not sure what this means. I'm really not. I just know that I can never return to where I have been. And I can't go back the way I came. Now Larry and I are thinking of wandering. Maybe even roaming the world. And as we plan, our progress is always forward. Perhaps like the earth we travelers need orbits of our own.

Rites of Passage

When I was a girl, our library had this summer reading program. You got a card with a worm on it. The worm was divided into many sections and wore a mortar board on its head. In other words a book worm. Everytime you read a book and talked with the librarian about it, you got to color in a section of your worm.

I remember riding home from the library with my bike basket filled with books, but I particularly recall the pleasure of returning to the library to color in my worm. I have always loved those things in life that mark our passages. A section of a worm, a milestone in life, and having my passport stamped.

One day when I was fifteen and walking home from school, my mother pulled up beside me. Rolling her window down, she said, "Get in. We're going to get our passports." I had no idea why I was going to get a passport or in fact that I was going anywhere. Or had anywhere to go. However my mother had it in her head. We were going to do the grand tour of Europe where she had never been.

The passport office was one of those dingy bureaucratic places and, as my mother and I sat side by side, me still trying to figure out what we were doing, a woman walked by us. She was goose-stepping like a Nazi and, for some reason, she gave me a Heil Hitler salute, followed by a Bronx cheer. I was frightened and stupified, but my mother burst out laughing. For her it was one of the funniest things she'd ever seen. I believe in some sense our trip began there.

I got my passport and, as with my book worm, it came to me as a blank slate. A tabla rosa. The way a child is born with nothing in its brain. I loved my passport as I'd loved my worm. In Paris in the early morning as the customs offical gave me my first stamp and it made that clicking sound, I knew that I had entered new terrain. Here was the proof. The stamp in my passport. Ever since then I have loved that moment. The click, the stamp, and voila, you have crossed over. You have arrived.