Traveling

When I was a kid on a northwest Missouri farm, eight miles out of town, sometimes I would see ads for pen pals from around the world and think that would be the coolest thing ever, to exchange letters with someone thousands of miles away, in a place you would likely never visit. For whatever reason I never chased that particular dream--probably I just got distracted, forgot about it, thought about it again, forgot about it again, got involved with something else. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

A whole bunch of years later, more or less on a whim, I plugged one of those omnipresent AOL disks into my computer and went online, went into “chat” and was dropped into one of those generic chat rooms, and found myself talking to someone in England, another somebody from Germany, other people from all kinds of other places, and it just fascinated the hell out of me--and I was hooked, although I did wear out, when it came to “chat,” within just a couple of years (after it had taken me, physically, to Louisville and Memphis and New Orleans and New York City, among other places not so well known, like Natchez, Mississippi).

A decade or so after that, I found Flickr just a month or so after I had acquired my first digital camera. Pictures I posted there led me to friendships with people from Romania (my two “Romanian Lauras”), Sweden, England, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, Canada, Montana . . . All over the place. (One of the proudest moments in my life came when one of the Romanian Lauras, an artist and a good one, told me that my photographs had inspired her to take up photography. She is in Italy now, studying photography at a school there.)

I could never have dreamed all that up, even as a pen-pal-dreaming kid.
For almost 10 years, I’ve been working at home as a medical transcriptionist for a Tennessee-based company. I’ve had supervisors from New York, Mississippi, Georgia and Pennsylvania, co-workers from nearly all over the country (as well as India, he says, grumpily).

Turns out the whole “pen-pal” thing was not a dream put aside, but merely a dream deferred.

It’s funny how life works sometimes, and funny how the world can shrink and expand, all at the same time.

Perhaps paradoxically, or maybe only contrarily, I’ve never had any particular desire to travel. In my distant youth I was stationed in Germany, saw a very little bit of that and loved it, and also got to visit Paris (France, not Missouri, although I’ve been through the latter as well). I’ve lived briefly in Kentucky, briefly in Indiana, for seven years in Montana, about the same in Mississippi, thought for a while about moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Weatherford, Texas. I’ve admired photographs from all over the world, wondered at the sheer beauty and grandeur and desolation and squalor and everything in between, but nevertheless remain quite content to stay where I am, to explore and photograph my own back yard and the occasional wonders within it.

My neighbor a mile or so to the south, who has lived in this little corner of Gentry County, Missouri, once told me, when I asked if he ever took a vacation (the guy works 12-16 or more hours a day on his farm; “When you love your job,” he once told me, “You never have to work a day in your life”), he just said, “There’s no place I’d rather go.” Gotta respect, maybe even envy that.

Just another rambling day, here in paradise.