Memories of trips with my parents — 25 years apart

Memories of Individual Travels with my Parents 25 years apart.

When parents are gone and siblings are gone, and you yourself are “up in years” and confronted with health challenges, and realize that every day you’re alive is a gift and not a given, you reflect. It’s called memories.

So not to suggest that I have thought about this suddenly, but the memories become more relevant and urgent to express, particularly as I’m basically my own family now. There are of course a lifetime of memories. Among the most endearing are the many family trips taken as a child.

Here is something unique: Two trips taken as an adult with one parent each 25 years apart. The awareness is different, the playing field is different. There is an appreciation of the circumstances. As a child you just take what is given to you. As an adult you share and want to give. My appreciation of my relationship with each parent and realizing their joy gives me joy and meaning. This in the context of a vacation, that is not a travelogue, but the experience of relationship.

I loved both of my parents. My mother was easy to love. My father was not or not all the time. So find in the context of my trip with him being critical and the guilt comes up, but also how I came to terms with his domineering ways and still find the joy in our travel together.

The first trip was with my mother in the mid 1970s. I was 25-26. A planned trip with my roommate fell through. I think we were supposed to go to Nova Scotia. My mother felt my disappointment and offered to take a road trip with me.  

I don’t know how we arrived at the decision, and probably I made the decision and she agreed. We used to go Maine many a summer for a week or two as a family. So that was part of it I think. The other part of it was our love of books and the idea to visit author homes in Concord, Massachusetts. My parents were originally from Massachusetts, but this is something neither of us had ever done.

I must pause here and say my mother and I were a lot alike. We shared all the time. We liked the same things. We agreed that we would not visit relatives in Massachusetts or announce that we were coming to the state. My grandparents were gone anyway. This was for us. So we went to see the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and others.

After that with no planned itinerary, we drove up into Southern Maine, which by the way, is not a place where we used to vacation – we used to go to a lake in Ellsworth, Maine because my father liked to go fishing, and tool around Central Maine and Bar Harbor.

Those trips were wonderful, too, and it wasn’t just about fishing, but my father was in charge. This time mom and I literally went where the wind blew us, which was the coastal road through Southern Maine and through all the little towns, like York and Kennebunkport, also tiny hamlets that had no famous tourist spots, just beautiful Maine scenery and whatever we happened upon. Like finding a craft show in a church or community basement. Lots of handmade jewelry. I think we bought the place out. We ate lots of seafood too.

At some point we decided it was time to double back. After all we lived pretty far, mom in South Jersey, and I was living in Philadelphia at the time. Then we got the crazy idea – I’m sure it was my crazy idea – to go back to Concord. We hadn’t seen all the author homes on the first go round! Mom was in total agreement. Let’s do that! And we did.

Although I said I remembered all the details, I lied or thought I remembered more. Just some of the details come back to me like a sepia photograph in my mind. The rest are lost to time, just the happy and relaxed feelings, how in sync we were, how free we both felt. Mom loved dad but she needed time away from him.

The dad trip. It was 2001 and significantly a month before 911. So it was August 2001. I was 50 in August 2001. As part of context, dad and I were both selling secondhand and rare books mostly on EBay, in dad’s case it was post retirement, post my mom’s long illness and passing a decade before. That was the catalyst, the books. Dad wanted to go to Maine to buy books as my parents had bought books and antiques when we used to go for summers in Maine.

It was unplanned, something to do in the afternoons after fishing, after lunch, take a ride down a country road and see what was there. What was there? Almost every house had a big white barn, we’re talking about the 1950s and 1960s, and those Mainers supplemented their income this way, selling their own stuff, selling antiques, and selling books. Whether they needed to do it or or was just a fun idea for them, I don’t know. Dad and I and a cousin tried to duplicate those trips with a trip to Maine to buy books in the 1990s and we did.

Dad wanted to do it again, but it was too long of a drive. He found out that airline prices were ridiculously high and he looked up London. We could fly to London for less than it cost to fly to Bangor, Maine! In dad’s adventurous spirit, which was still alive and well, he said do you want to go to London?  I had been before, and he had been as a merchant marine in the 1930s, but I jumped on the bandwagon and said let’s do it!  It wasn’t specifically to buy books but to have a vacation.

Dad floored me by asking me to come up with the itinerary. In an alternate life I guess I should have been a travel agent, and if social media had existed at the time been a travel influencer!

I do because of the time difference, remember more of these details. Dad did leave the itinerary up to me, but being dad, he fought me, particularly on accommodations. He wanted to go cheap, cheap, cheap and there were no Air BnBs, mainly no cheap, cheap, cheat. I had stayed in bed and breakfasts myself in 1989. There was fledgling internet. The accommodations issue almost killed the trip. I had a bad feeling it was going to be a disaster from the start and it almost was.

We got to London. Dad would not “allow” us to take a minivan into London from the airport, and remember we had luggage and we were exhausted with the travel. We “had to” take public transportation.

We were taking the tube, a half hour trip into the city from Heathrow during rush hour, 8 o’clock local time. The saving grace – we got on in the beginning and there were plenty of seats. As we got through stop after stop more people piled on, and we were at risk of being trapped. We had to beg our way off at our stop. Luckily, the stereotypically polite British let us out.

Then we walked and we walked and we walked until we got to our row house of a hotel – they call them terraces in Britain. We walked in and found out that it was a dirty crumbling hole in the wall and looked more like a frat house, where young guys/college students would crash for the night, several to a room. Dad and I looked to each other in horror, and told the manager in what looked like a cross between a bridge toll booth or movie theater booth that we couldn’t stay there. He looked surprised but said OK. Then dad turned to me and asked what are we going to do?  This from a dad who always had an answer, but he was now in his 80s, still good, still trying, but not the same. I was sad, but I didn’t have a lot of time to reflect on that.

There were two things going for us.

One, it was August, and although hot, it was London, not South Jersey.

Second, I remembered in our long walk to find the dump that we had passed a Comfort Inn.

I said dad, Comfort Inn is an American hotel or motel. Let’s go back there and ask. We didn’t have cell phones or internet, as I said. It was an unfamiliar neighborhood, although inside London, so we walked again with the luggage. The Comfort Inn had openings for the rest of the week – it was a Tuesday – but we would have to move on the weekend as they were booked. They changed their mind by the weekend and let us stay the whole time.

Things started looking up. We were treated very well there. One little incident. I have not experienced much antisemitism in my life. I guess you could say I’m lucky. I was coming down the elevator for breakfast one morning at the Comfort Inn. There was a British couple in the elevator. We nodded and said good morning. In the dining room I met dad.

As I was passing the British couple’s table, I heard them say in a low but still audible voice, Jewish, and they nodded their heads in my direction. I felt like screaming. It was a small thing, but I had not been exposed to this before or hardly. I didn’t reply and kept on walking. In my head I came up with different scenarios. I would say, yes, what about it? Or yes, I’m a very proud Jew? Or yes, thank God I’m a Jew. None of that happened. I didn’t even tell dad. A few years later on a job a situation came up where a person made a remark in the lunch room not knowing that I was Jewish, and that time I answered and rebutted and she apologized.

So what did we do? 

Every day I had laid out a set itinerary in advance and dad loved it and agreed to everything! Shocking, but true! The first day was one of the most touching and memorable experiences. We were totally jet lagged, but I had noticed from the guidebooks that there was such a thing as Czech Torah scrolls in a museum of sorts in a synagogue in London.

You could not just go there. You had to call ahead. So we went. I don’t remember the name of the synagogue but it was near Royal Albert Hall – we did not get to visit that.

We called and we got lost, but eventually got there. The reason we had to call ahead it was the year of one of the Intifadas in Israel. They were on alert even in London. A woman came to the door of the synagogue and went through several locks to open the door to let us in.

On the second floor laid out on shelves were burned Torah scrolls from the Holocaust, each labeled with the towns they had come from. There were no words. We stood in silence and looked and lightly touched. Some were repaired or the hope was that they were going to be repaired, but it was sort of like a Genizah of Torah scrolls. We signed our names in a book and made a contribution. Our synagogue of the time, TBS, had been there and bought one of the Torah scrolls, we learned.

So the rest of the trip:  One day it was the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. Another day it was Greenwich and the museum with the clocks, the Greenwich mean time line, and the sailing instruments. Another day it was Richmond, where we visited Henry the Eighth’s castle. Dad by the way wanted to buck every line. He thought he could argue his way to the front, but the guides in charge would not give way. I either inwardly cowered or would whisper, dad, dad, no, you can’t do that! Be patient. Wait. We’ll get in.

Another day we went to Notting Hill, that Notting Hill, where the film Four Weddings and a Funeral took place with Hugh Grant. We went there because on the weekends they had a famous flea market. Dad totally embarrassed me by haggling for what seemed like forever with a couple. We bought a few things. I mostly wandered away so I didn’t have to stand there and witness the haggling. Again, the whispering, dad, no. That didn’t work, but we did make some great purchases.

You ask what about the books or bookstores?  The famous used and rare bookshops were on Charing Cross Road in Central London. That was a bust. You felt watched all the time and the prices – well they felt like they had a captive audience. We couldn’t buy anything or feel comfortable even looking.

So in Greenwich we hit the jackpot after we did the Greenwich mean time tour, and this was a surprise. The best things are when you don’t expect them, I mean the good best things of course. We wandered through the town and saw a tiny hole in the wall book shop. Should we go in? Should we not go in?

Again, dad surprised me by leaving it up to me. I wavered. All right, I said. Let’s go in. I must have spent 5 or 10 minutes and sat down. It was a used and rare bookstore, but it wasn’t clicking for me. On the other hand it was clicking for dad. The long and short of it, dad and the owner established a connection, and dad went back at least once, maybe twice to London and bought out a lot of the store as the owner invited him to look at the stock in the basement.

It was shipped back to the United States. Dad did very well. He was happy. The owner was happy. There were rare books dad left to me after he passed away from that lot, and had said, here, you know what to do with these after I’m gone, you decide, and I did.

What did we eat?  Mostly, we ate in an Israeli takeout that we stumbled on in the neighborhood of London where the Comfort Inn was. It was a hole in the wall, but we’d sit at one of the two little tables and eat the most delicious food made by two Israeli brothers. We met a British-Greek woman eating there. She heard our American accents and asked to join us. We’re friends to this day.

There is also a Chinatown in London in Soho for those of you who know it. I may be mixing it up with another trip because we went back after 911 with another friend of mine.

A couple of incidents worth noting.

As I said, this was a month before 9/11. Every morning a tabloid paper was left at our door, probably the Daily Mail. I quickly realized that a lot of what was written was bunk. However, something chilling and seemingly true caught my eye, not reported in American papers. There was a list of numbers of immigrants to Britain and from which countries. Alarming numbers. The highest was from Iraq.

They said refugees were living in tents on the Iraqi border. There were also large numbers of refugees from different countries, mostly the Middle East, getting to France, and then trying to legally or illegally cross the English Channel. They said they wanted to take their chances in the UK rather than an uncertain future in France. This was what was reported, anyway.

The other thing is a small thing, but telling in retrospect. In the neighborhood we were staying I wanted to go to a nail salon. I found a time and made an appointment. The manager was very congenial, but as I was sitting getting my nails done, a man in traditional Arab garb walked in, and somehow got in a whispered conversation in Arabic with the manager. The man wanted to know who I was or what I was doing there. I don’t know entirely how I knew this, as the only word I understood was American, but they both looked in my direction.

So London was and probably still is famous for its walking tours. In 2001 you could choose a walking tour 365 days a week for $5.00 each with an excellent tour guide.  So of course our top choice was the Jewish East End walking tour. Again, pictures come to mind, not all of the details. I know we walked through the former Spitalfield Market, Petticoat Lane, Whitehall, and finally to Aldgate where we came to the highlight: The Bevis Marks Synagogue. The Hebrew name is Sharei Shamaim — the Gates of Heaven, built in 1701.  It is still standing and in use. It’s an Orthodox Sephardic synagogue, similar to, but not exactly a replica of the Sephardic synagogue in Amsterdam. It is said that influences were also Spanish style churches of the time and the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral built by Christopher Wren. Jews were being allowed back into the UK after being expelled for about 300 years, and many were living in Amsterdam and wanted to relocate to England and they wanted a synagogue. There were still Jews — Conversos who wanted to get out of Spain and Portugal, and they too flooded the UK.

The ark is Renaissance style. Panels are painted to look like marble, but are in fact, oak.  There are seven hanging brass candelabra symbolizing the seven days of the week, the central candelabrum donated by the Great Synagogue in Amsterdam, the Ner Tamid made of silver that was installed in 1876, and twelve pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel in the women’s gallery. Just a few of the details and the flavor.

There are still small numbers of Jews living in the East End—you can look up the numbers—but since World War II they have scattered to various other parts of the city.

I can say two things about these trips, which I guess you can say about a lot of life.

Experiences lead to other experiences. They grow tentacles, a lot unexpected. The other is the love of a parent and my love for them.  To see their joy as well as my own, their generosity, their love for me, there are no words.

As long as I am alive, these memories are alive, and now they’re written down, too.