Alan S. Oser

I keep a map of France at my bedside. In the living room I keep Elderhostel’s thick directory of international tours. I scan the Web periodically seeking out inns in Portugal and small hotels in Scandinavia.

But I’m not going anywhere. This year, at least, I’m staying home.

Not out of a loss of interest in traveling, or a lack of means. My wife and I have not ruled out a major trip in the more distant future. But right now I am busy thinking about traveling. As one grows older, and more vulnerable to aches and pains, it is important to cultivate this talent for mental travel, for giving full rein to the imagination while sitting in a well-upholstered armchair.

Thinking about traveling in advance of the actuality has for me always been an unmixed pleasure. The trip itself has usually been a mixed pleasure – mixed with disappointment or travail. It has never been a disaster, a word that travelers use too often to describe trips that were not entirely successful. Thinking about the trip after we are safely home is normally a pleasure also, although less so than talking about it to others.

Getting pleasure from talking about the trip requires considerable cooperation from the listener. Cooperation is always forthcoming from my listeners because I select only those with proven eagerness, feigned or genuine, to hear about our journey in some detail and admire our pictures. My favorite listeners are those skilled at nodding appreciatively and uttering the words, “Oh, really!” If what they hear or see reminds them of their own travels, they hold their tongues. Their attention is seemingly not diverted from my monologue.

Unfortunately, for me, I am not widely traveled. Prior to my retirement in the year 2000, my wife and I had been to Europe three times, once in 1970 on a three-week spin through northern Italy and France, ending in two rainy days in Paris, and twice on brief jaunts to London.

But since retirement we have been to France for a month, the Greek Islands for three weeks and Portugal for one week. We have never been to Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, and probably will never get to them. No matter. We yearn to see more of Europe.

To yearn effectively, I refer frequently to the map of France at my bedside, and to a spiral-bound Michelin Tourist and Motoring Atlas for Europe. I imagine a car trip starting, say, in Lyons and driving southwest through the countryside, arriving ten days later in Barcelona. I repeat to myself the charming names of the French towns and villages we will visit along the way – Chavaniac, Marvejois, Florac, Aubenas. I refer periodically to the book Off the Beaten Track: France, which has chapters on two regions our journey will take us through – the Cévennes and Ardèche. Again the names seduce me: Cassagnas, Alpiers, Montpézat, Largentière. I will certainly see the remarkable new bridge in Millau.

Unpleasantness never intrudes upon these imaginings. I probably will not be able to say that for the trip itself, if we ever take it.

In 1970 we managed to drive into Paris after nearly three weeks on the road, starting in Rome. I had never been to Paris and I was giddy with expectation for days before our arrival. But my wife had a miserable cold when we got there. The dismal chilly rainy weather was no help. She spent most of our two days in Paris in bed.

The entire three-week trip produced a variety of mishaps and misadventures, if no disasters. But this is what trips ought to do in order to generate the stuff of memory. If memory is not so important, why are we taking all those pictures? I look back now at our album from 1970 and admire not only the cities and towns and countryside of northern Italy and France but also my wife and myself as we were then. We were both slim. I had a head of hair.

Forgotten events re-emerge as if they were dreamt, not lived. On Armed Forces Day in Bologna, a militaristic parade of men in plumed helmets stopped for a ceremony and some speeches. A Communist haranguer in the crowd rushed forward and threw an egg in the face of a speaker, a beribboned veteran. I immortalized the haranguer with a photo of him with his arm outstretched, but I hesitated to capture the sight of the egg meeting the speaker’s forehead and his wonderful astonished expression.

The experience glows in memory, although to this day I regret that I lacked the boldness to shoot a picture two seconds later of the speaker with egg dripping down his face.

On the other hand, memories of pleasures of the flesh die. I have no memory of the taste of the remarkable food we ate in Bologna, only the recollection that I considered those meals remarkable at the time. So was it really worthwhile to eat fine meals on the trip? It seemed irresistible at the time. Now I feel I can stay home and find superb restaurant meals in New York City.

As with the Bologna incident, the memories that the trip produced lie mainly outside the major sights that attract tourists. We passed through glorious country, and visited wonderful old towns with beautiful art and statuary. My principal specific memory of the French Riviera, however, is of Theodore Kheel, the labor negotiator then much in the news in New York, plucking two dozen ties off the rack at a stand in the airport in Cannes. Two dozen! Did he plan to wear them? Give them as gifts? (If I had gone back 20 years later, when I would have been about the age he was then, I would probably have picked up a couple of dozen myself.)

I remember buying a bottle of local wine at every village we visited in Italy, and lugging a lot of them all the way to Paris. These regional wines were too cheap to pass up, but we couldn’t consume more than a fraction of them. So we left the rest with a friend in Paris before we flew home. Where could we go now to buy fine things that are too cheap to pass up? Would we want them even if we found them? As gifts, perhaps, but the acquisitive lust no longer lurks in my breast.

At an advanced age it is unwise to make the production of memories an overriding goal in travel. I have enough memories. I do not need new ones. This might be a time for new sensual pleasure, but what’s left there? Not so much in seeing, smelling, hearing or touching unfamiliar things. I’ve seen, smelled, heard and touched quite a bit already. Eating and drinking still appeal, but I don’t have to travel for that. A sense of excitement at seeing great sights no longer comes so easily. Even “broadening the mind” is not so useful a rationale. There are other ways to do that.

There is another pleasure inherent in travel, however, and for me it has not died, or even diminished. That is the pleasure of meeting new people, of enjoying human behavior, of dealing with unfamiliar circumstances, of confronting the unexpected, of experiencing the unpredictable. Travel opens these possibilities, especially in foreign countries. Even on an uneventful trip to Florida recently we found pleasure in meeting a few couples from New England. They had never heard any of the five jokes I know, or the handful of witty anecdotes I rely on at dinner parties with strangers. Travel broadens my repertoire.

Where’s that map of France? I’m going!