POST #165: TRAVELING IN MY HEAD

I’m a notorious armchair traveler. This is an expression I haven’t heard used much nowadays. At one time it was used to describe someone who did his or her traveling through books – there were lots of travel books when I was young - in the comfort of their own home. Today, everyone I know is flying off to somewhere grand and exotic. “Morocco?” “Bosnia?” “You haven’t been to the Carpathians? “ No, and neither do I intend to go. I am perfectly happy traveling in my head, or if I need to get out, within a twenty mile ratio of home. If I’m going to get an upset stomach, I’d prefer to be close to familiar facilities.

In The Bardo

Diptych   66”x86”. Oil, charcoal and collage on canvas

I come by my stay-at-home genes honestly. My parents came to New York as teenagers in the early 1900s and never budged. Why should they? New York had everything they could ever want in terms of culture and ethnic diversity. There were Greek neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Chinese neighborhoods. Food shops, restaurants, clothing stores. Maybe the Metropolitan Opera wasn’t equal to La Scala (although it probably was), or the art museums the size of the Louvre, but they were more than enough to amply fill their cultural requirements. My sweet father had an extensive library of travel books, most written in the early 1900s when the world wasn’t McDonalized. I’ve kept a few. At night, he would sit in his comfortable armchair, next to out cabinet radio, listen to WQXR (the classical music station), get a book (with photos) and travel (safely) in his head.

After college, most of my friends set off on travels. Because I was needed at home to take care of my parents (I was an “only” child with elderly, unwell parents), I had a one-hour travel radius and could only go where I could be reached quickly in an emergency. Somehow, I don’t remember being envious of my wandering friends. I was studying Art History in graduate school and it seemed to me that a version (maybe not as grand) of everything I would have seen in Europe, was within my one hour time frame. So the Catskills weren’t the Alps and Coney Island not the Riviera; I didn’t feel deprived.

Heaven on Earth

Charcoal and oil on canvas
Center panel. 72” 44”

I remember listening to a woman at a party brag about her recent trip to the Carribean. I asked her if she (a native New Yorker) had ever visited the Spanish market under the elevated tracks in east Harlem? It was a typical tropical street marqueta, except that the stallkeepers all spoke Spanish with a Yiddish accent. I would go there with a Cuban artist friend and we would sketch the natives from a hiding place behind the stone pillars. But then, you couldn’t brag about going to Spanish Harlem could you?

After marrying, I had three children in five years, and since going to the supermarket with them was a herculaean effort, travel to foreign places was definitely out of the question.  When we moved to Stamford 55 years ago (only temporarily, we thought) we discovered there was no end to interesting local places to take them to and they did not grow up culturally deprived. My husband, also a non-traveler, preferred his garden to any place in the world.  He had served in the South Pacific during World Was II and when he discovered that the women of the island he was stationed on bore no resemblance to those painted by Gauguin, he lost interest in exotic places. When two of our children moved to California, we did get out and about on the West Coast, visiting the Redwoods, the Pacific Northwest, San Franscisco, but the New York Botanical Gardens are 30 minutes from our house and, except for the joy of seeing our children, we would have been just as happy going there.

Nowadays, given my “advanced” years, I definitely prefer to travel in my head. There’s enough stored there to keep me visually occupied, in fact, I’m never going to get around to using the imagery that’s already on file. I know that many, if not most, of my readers love to travel, and I’m not being critical of them. À chacun son goût (See, I even speak French.)

Renee Kahn