We Miss the World

Even before our wonderful Spanish trip ended, Dan and I talked of our next journey. Vienna, Austria on the ice blue Danube called to us. We imagined ourselves off the Ringstrasse in a sunny café sipping frothy Viennese coffees, sharing a sachertorte. Dan wanted to see the Kunsthistoirisches Museum that houses the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, two artists I love. And I wanted to show him Hundertwasser’s whimsical village for I’ve been to Vienna before and had tucked its stately boulevards and manicured green spaces in the breast pocket above my heart, always intending to return.

Then the pandemic hit, and we were forced to hunker down. Our wanderlust went into hibernation. Still, we pored over maps of Paris, Italy, London, retaking our favorite journeys, blowing on the coals of memory. Dan, always good with details, checked our passports and discovered they would expire in early 2021.

So, with great reluctance, on a rainy June morning, we went to a seedy strip mall in Merrifield, put on double masks and latex gloves, and waited for the proprietor to open. We decided we would be safer if we went inside his camera shop before any other customers arrived. Once the proprietor opened his door and beckoned us, we swallowed hard and walked in. Dan let him know what we wanted: passport photographs.

After he took our photos, we waited on the sidewalk outside his shop as he developed them. Dan went into pay.
Our next stop was the regional Post Office and the most terrifying experience of all: I had to put my old passport in an envelope and mail it to the US State Department, which wasn’t even open at the time. The lockdown for the pandemic was still going on. What if my passport got lost? What if I never saw that beloved document again?

I’m not materialistic. I like a nice coat or dress as much as the next woman, but things are just things to me. But I admit I love my passports for they are the official record of all those beautiful places in the world I have traveled. Those inky smudged stamps inside are my favorite souvenirs.

I got my first passport the spring of 2001 when I won a fiction grant from the state of Virginia and decided to take myself across the pond to England for the summer. After that, 9/11 happened and the world paused. No one traveled for a while. Still my wanderlust refused to subside. By the winter of 2003, the world called me to venture forth.

My first time over the pond with my husband, John, was to Paris between Christmas and New Year’s. Early one morning we walked through the Tuilleries Garden dusted in snow. Our footprints the first on its paths. The summer of 2004 found us in ancient Krakow, Poland. Thus, every trip pushed us further across Europe as far east as Lviv, Ukraine.

The last stamps in my first passport were for Florence, Italy, where John and I went after he was diagnosed with cancer in 2011. At that time, we did not know this would be his last trip to Europe.

Once John and I returned from Florence, I had to apply for my second passport. But it would be five years before I would use that passport. John died November 2015. The next time I traveled, I had no choice. I went solo.

The first stamps in passport number two are dated 2016: St. Kitts & Nevis, islands far south in the Caribbean. I went there on Valentine’s Day, 2016. This was my first trip after John died when I visited a dear cousin who had a house high on a bluff overlooking the bluest blue sea. Weighed down with grief, I felt as if I was moving through sludge. How glad I was to get away from Virginia’s deep snow winter and let the warm sun and white sand begin to heal me.

My next stamp was Paris, where I spent most of the summer of ’16, living in an apartment in the 7th arrondissement. Paris was my answer to the grief that came over me in waves. Thanks to all John taught me about navigating a city, Paris quickly felt like home. Sometimes, though, I was still moving through sludge. In the long summer twilights, I wandered the city, often imagining I saw John sitting at a café table or standing before the grape green Seine.

From Paris, I flew Easy Jet to Krakow, but there are no passport stamps for this journey, since Poland is part of the EU. In Krakow, I met my son. We had an apartment in the Old Town, where I enjoyed showing him his father’s favorite place in the world. While my husband and I traveled all over central and Eastern Europe, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, etc. we always found ourselves including a stop in gorgeous Krakow, known as the Paris of the East.

In January 2018, I met Dan on a Match date at a coffee shop. He talked about how his wife had died after a long illness, and that his grief had sent him to Florence to study the Italian language. I was struck by our similar responses to terrible loss. As he spoke of his favorite Italian Renaissance artists, his voice impassioned, I thought: I could fall in love with this man. And, so it came to pass.

Like me, Dan lives to travel. On our first journey together, we went up the Adriatic from southern Italy to Bassano Del Grappa in the Veneto, where the plains give way to hills that lead to the Alps. From there we went onto Venice then Rome, so beloved by Dan, a lover of all things Italian.

Our next stamp was London in the fall of 2019. London was my first love, where my wanderlust took hold. Returning to my old haunts in South Kensington felt bittersweet. From there we took the Chunnel to Paris and stayed in the Marais. In February 2020, we went to Spain, a country neither of us had ever visited before. What fun we had exploring Madrid then training it south to Seville, where we even took in a futbol game and have become fans of Seville FC ever since.

All the while we were in Spain, the virus was spreading across the globe like a dark shadow. In our apartment in Seville, I often listened to the World Health Organization’s daily briefings about the novel coronavirus. Still, I had no idea what awaited us in the US nor how our lives would change.

The world still calls to us. There is so much we want to see and do. Dan has been studying a map of Vienna and looking at Air BnBs there. But we cannot travel now. Compared to the more than 300,000 dead in this country and the great suffering going on here and across the globe, our inability to see more of the world is a minor problem.

But we are not young. Our health is good, yet our lives are finite. There remains so much we want to see. Then a miracle happened: vaccines have become available. Thank you medical researchers! God bless pharmaceutical companies. Hooray for science! We want to get vaccinated and travel again. This Christmas our message to the world is: hope to see you soon.