The Girl With the Gypsy Feet

We can be having dinner or sitting in a departure lounge or hosting a party,  I look at her and see the girl I married almost 52 years ago. Last month it was John’s birthday. She was so alive I said to Kathleen “Look at your mother”

Anyway, I started this post over a year ago. It didn’t seem to gel so I saved it and moved on. Last year Marilyn went to work and fell in the parking lot breaking a bone in her foot. Marilyn is very used to doing what she wants to do when she wants to do it and being off her feet does not suit her at all. But it reminded me about this post and my intention to write a celebration of our travels. It still didn’t gel but that look at Johns party inspired me.

 

 

 

Kathleen reminded us that day last year that on June 17^th 1986 she took Marilyn by the scuff of the neck, sat her in a seat on a Pan Am 747, plied her with Brandy and took her to Paris. I’ll not forget the phone call (at 3AM) from Paris. “Start saving your money, I love it”. They went all over Paris, then on to Italy to connect with Marilyn’s Italian family. They filled up an album with photos, saw everything they could in three weeks or so and came back with memories they have to this day. And Marilyn became an International Gypsy. We’ve done our best to wear out a 747. Our friends in Europe keep asking us to come back and the Girl with the Gypsy Feet just keeps on organizing the trips and we keep packing the suitcases and getting on the planes. I don’t want to know when it’s the last one.

 

When I was young I went to five elementary schools (not counting a month at a school in Minneapolis while a polio epidemic raged in Houston). This was more a result of the Houston school district expanding at a furious rate than it was my family moving. Toss in spending most of my summers with one or the other of my grandparents in either Wisconsin or Minnesota and the result is I’m kind of a stick in the mud. Got my going out of my system early, or so I thought. Marilyn on the other hand was born in Stockton, lived here her whole life and until that fateful day in 1986 she had never been more than 500 miles from home. But once she got over her fear of flying she really made up for lost time. And that fear of flying was no act. When we took somebody to the airport her palms began to sweat and her lips got pale.

                    Here she is on the balcony of the Concortel in Paris on that fateful first trip.

 

 

 

                             

I don’t know how many times we’ve been to Europe. No, seriously, have no idea. I could keep track until about twenty. Then they all started to run together. In the back closet there are 31 little boxes of photographs and a bunch of photo albums. They aren’t so much pictures as they are memories of all the places we’ve been and people we’ve met. I know I should scan them all and put them on a cloud so we don’t lose them. One of these days I will.

Which brings me back to Marilyn.  What she did and the love she showed all those kids we hosted has been repaid a thousand times over. We go there and they come here. When they are here Marilyn cooks for them. When we are there they take us everywhere and show us things no tour guide even knows about.  Seems fair to me. There is another bonus as well and one we never thought of. All those kid have parents, and the parents are people who will put their precious son or daughter on a plane. Then the kid flies 5500 miles to live with strangers. So we met a whole bunch of interesting and accomplished parents. After a while one of the kids says  ”There’s somebody I want you to meet.” And another special young person enters our life. They share their lives with us, a few years later theres a phone call or an E-mail and a second generation shows up. I’ve read a lot of travel books, but because of Marilyn and her gypsy feet I got to live one.  Best of all, we still have our health and we aren’t done yet.

So for

Olivier and Catherine and Michele and Marco and Enrico and Valentina and Alberto and Nanu and Amilie and Laura and Allesandro and wives and husbands and significant others and parents and children and all the rest of you, we’ll be seeing you.