First, let’s just acknowledge that no one else really wants to hear about your vacation. It’s not that they’re rude or uncaring, just that these experiences which have been so intense, so life-transforming for you are based on your complete and total immersion in another place. I remember as a child traveling with my parents and then, later, sitting in the den as my dad loaded a projector with Kodachromes to share with friends after dinner. Encountering a donkey and a herd of goats while stumbling up a scrubby gravel hillside path on a hot, remote island was magical. The slides of that moment? It’s a donkey. And some goats. Do they eat that yucca?
We return from these experiences struck by the way the light glints from the wavelets in a pleasantly blinding way, by the feel of a fresh-baked croissant collapsing between our fingertips, by the smells of diesel exhaust and hot sand and strange flowers and cooking fish mingling in our noses. We see a child who looks somehow different from the children we know and yet whose smile is so…universal. We watch strangers greet each other and gossip in a language we don’t understand. We sleep until the foreign-accented seagulls call us awake. And we pledge, we swear that we will return home transformed, that when we pour our coffee and shower and make our beds and load the car for work next week it will be different. More like them, less like us. And we’re sure that our friends and co-workers will be able to tell. After all, we have been transformed, baptized by showering in someone else’s water. How could this whole experience not be as fascinating to our parents, friends, and neighbors as it was to us?
“How was your vacation?”
“Life-transforming.”
“Right. You have pictures? Oh, what are those, goats?”
I promise: no goats, no donkeys. But still, I know how it is. This blog is just so that when you see us, you can pretend that you can tell how transformed we are. We know: you, too are now different. And we want to hear all about it.
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