When I say it’s a very big deal to come to Paris, I don’t say it because I’m an idiot, I say it because where I come from people stay in their places.
And this can’t be understood, perhaps, unless you grew up in exactly the same way, in a town of 8,000 people and a family of seven in the middle of Wisconsin surrounded by dairy farms, where, when I was young, at least, nobody seemed to stray too far. It wasn’t done, it wasn’t much considered, and if it was talked about, it was something impossibly foreign and unbelievably expensive and certainly too far away to actually be real. Maybe you would call it small-mindedness, but to me it was more a sense that things were just fine as they were, where they were, of not asking too much from the world and respecting your boundaries. (It took me 20 years to get to Chicago, for example, and Chicago was 300 miles south via one major interstate highway.)
The world beyond those boundaries was too big and too foreign to bother much about (we know wherefore our political divides originate, and why they dig so deep and personal). Not that stepping outside them was ever discouraged, per se, but it certainly wasn’t encouraged (to this day my parents’ reaction is “Ack! Paris! Alone??! Aren’t you scared!”). Of course I’m scared! That’s why I’m doing it.
When I say it’s a very big deal to come to Paris as it was earlier to get to New York City and then London, I say it because as I sat in JFK alone Saturday night, after six months of planning and wildly enthusiastic anticipation, what every voice inside my head was telling me to do was go home.
But I didn’t.
Kari Geltenmeyer blogs at Lit+Wit.
Very cool!
Exciting and/or fulfilling pretty much never occupy the same space as safe.
I enjoyed this … could relate to the ‘go home’ voice. I moved to Istanbul alone, from New Zealand.
Congratulations on ignoring the voice. More than worth it, eh.