While your knees are good

Inevitably, after you tell people you are getting ready to quit your jobs and spend a year traveling around the world, there is this empty space that seems to beg an explanation. So, Annette and I have gotten really good at the short explanation: It is something we have both always wanted to do and we want to do it before we have children, which we would like to do in a year or two. Sometimes, I feel the need to throw in something about the fact that we have the money to do it, which my mom left me when she died, and that it would please her to see us spend it that way. (Invoking the dead seems so irrefutable should anybody question our motivations or commitment to do the trip).

It has been interesting to see people's reactions to our plans. Our friends with small children say, "Do it before you have children. Now's the time."

Folks from a generation before us say, "Do it while you still have good knees." I like this practical bit of advice. There is something nice and fundamental about it.

When I volunteered as a creative writing instructor in an adult literacy class in New Orleans years ago, we used to do all of these fun lessons to try to get the classes' creative juices flowing. It was always fascinating how brilliant, articulate and creative the students were, but when it came to writing it down, they were trapped inside a first grader's vocabulary and grammar. And a very boring first grader at that. It was like the tip of a pencil restricted all of that creativity and brilliance from flowing onto the page. It was just too small for it to fit through. One day, we brought in a Langston Hughes poem. I think the poem was called, On Freedom, but google doesn't seem to deem it popular enough for it to come up when I search for it. Anyway, after we read the poem, we did an exercise in which we asked people to talk (and eventually write) about what freedom means to them. There was one gentleman in the class, Michael, who was in his forties, and suffers from cerebral palsy. It had left him on crutches with limited mobility. And he wrote a poem about running through the hallways at school. That was his dream of freedom: to run unhibited through the hallways at school.

Perhaps this trip is our version of running through the hallways at school. It is certainly a blessing to have such mobility, much less to exercise it. It is good to have good knees. I look forward to putting them to excellent use in the next year!