Travel

I did it for you, dear reader. I did it all for you. I did something I vowed I would never do. Not in a million years. But there I was in Verona. City of Romeo and Juliet. City of beauty. And after seeing so many beautiful things, one does get a bit peckish. And all the guidebooks recommended the same thing: horse. It’s a specialty of the area. So when Jim and I found ourselves at the local restaurant perusing the menu, there it was, staring us in the face: smoked horse with arugala salad. There was also pasta with a donkey ragú on the menu like it was the most normal thing in the world to eat these equines. “ I guess we had better try it,” said Jim. “Really?” “Yeah. How bad can it be?” He said nonchalantly. I could sense a challenge. “OK, go ahead order it.” “Ok, I will,” he countered, adding, “and we’ll share it.” I took a large gulp of my prosecco and waited anxiously for the dish to arrive.

It’s not as though I am vegetarian or even a vegan. It’s not as though I grew up riding horses through the British countryside or fox hunting, thank God. But I suppose the prospect of eating horse is like eating dog. i.e. eating a pet. Although to be honest I’m not much of a dog person either. I prefer cats. And thankfully no one ever talks about eating cats. OK, maybe in Asia But nonetheless horses and dogs are our friends: we feed them, we take care of them and there is something about turning around, killing them and eating them that seems rather upsetting. A ‘Charlotte’s Web’ syndrome, if you will.

Yesterday I opened a “letter” from my mother; a perfect example of her eccentric idea of correspondence.  Bereft of card, signature, or, God forbid, “Dear Daughter”, the envelope contained 3 newspaper clippings – each annotated with her inimitable, looping script.  To the first clipping, a review cautioning that a new kid’s hardback called “The Graveyard Book” may be too dark for sensitive children, my mother had added “This sounds good!”  A study exploring the effects of the color red on both attention span and anxiety prompted this commentary: “You know I made all red things for your cradle and crib!  How to create an obsessive compulsive?”  And of course my personal favorite, an interview in which Nadya Suleman, the recent mother of octuplets, asserts that she wanted a family to help combat depression.  In this article the words “children” “cure” and “depression” have all been manically underlined.  Radiating a giant arrow, the newspaper’s indent points to my mother’s own thickly inked phrase: “What an idiot!”  She may not write much, but it sure reads loud and clear.

My mother’s attitude towards children and their rearing being what it is, she often chose the Wolf Creek Inn as the ultimate destination on the many and extensive road trips we took together.  Touted as “the oldest continuously operated hotel in the Pacific Northwest” by the State of Oregon’s recreation department, the Inn boasts perfectly articulated period décor, both a ball and dining room, and a magical, perfumed orchard.  It is also remote, haunted, and almost entirely unfit for children (read: no television).

Last weekend I did one of those things that’s really not fair to do to your boyfriend. I told him I wanted to do something extra fun and that I wanted him to plan it. I do this to him a lot and we often end up happily watching a movie and eating take-out instead, so I didn’t think anything of it when I canceled on him last-minute. He waited until I got home from dinner to tell me that he had actually come up with a plan, “What is it??” “It’s no big deal.” “What is it??” “We can do it another night.” “What is it?!” So he told me that he was going to ask me if I didn’t mind not sleeping at either of our houses.  Where would we have slept?…A fancy hotel in Santa Barbara? …His parents’ beach house in Ventura? …Paris??,

“Morongo Casino.” Morongo Casino???? Was he serious? That wasn’t romantic! But he told me that he was going to take me to the fancy restaurant on the top floor and that he’d show me the rooms online and even I’d think they were pretty nice. And when he brought it up again at breakfast the next day, I could see that he really wanted to go and maybe I should just suck it up and go. And anyway, we could stop at Hadley’s for date shakes on the way back.  And he thought maybe I could wear that green dress I wore the night we met because it was lucky. And where else would he fit in with that ridiculous moustache he’d recently grown?

Lots of winters, I’ve been lucky enough to join in the migration unique to a certain subspecies of Los Angeles native where flocks of family units pick up and move five hours by oversold mechanized bird west to an abbreviated hyphen of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  But I don’t mean to sound dispassionate or cynical or something, because the nagging concerns of existential meaning¹ that the previous sentence  might appear to have summoned kind of just slink away when that first warm blanket of air wraps you up in the middle of December, when the roars of leaf-blowers and the 101 have been traded for the soft lapping of the sea, when you first pull up to the shining white sprawl of a resort where everything from the photocopied New York Times crossword puzzles waiting at breakfast to the pool waterslide helps aid in the dissolution of whatever negative thoughts might be careening around between your ears. 

Never mind that the concept of vacation as escape is turned into this sort of farce due to the feeling that all inhabitants of Southern California who travel to Hawaii during the holidays end up staying at one of three hotels within half a mile of each other on the western shore of Maui and hyper-image-conscious businesspeople/kids/vague acquaintances bump into their peers all week long, except that all the judging here goes on while everybody is half-naked.  Never mind all of that; it’s totally possible to ignore the Dark Side of this scene and just chill out.