CuppaGemma

Travel can be a good thing. It is a talisman to the future.

You get in the car and go and go until the bridges have been crossed, the tolls paid and then you are somewhere else entirely. Maybe only for a little while and then you have to loop back on all the roads and return to wear you started from. But friendship dissolves miles. They are tiresome weeds sometime, but nothing an early start and some hot coffee can’t resolve. You make jokes on the number of miles and minutes and predict when each of you is due to hit X or Y spot.

What travel does is show you the next steps.

The odometer goes up a couple of hundred miles and the town is different, the air is different and the stoplights. But it is a place that is there and now you are in it. Is it somewhere you wish to stay, or to simply keep arriving to over and over again.

The Staten Island Ferry crosses a little bit of water and 23 minutes later, after standing out in the crisp of the morning with dollar coffee you are in Manhattan all eager and waiting to be serious and busy with suits and skirts, meetings and haggles. A pulsing knot of people organized in floors organized in buildings organized over the grid that I call “the city”.

Heading back heads are down with the deflatedness of a long day to bills to children, to row houses and garbage collection schedules that may be inconvenient.

But Manhattan is there as much as Rome or Denmark or Owls Head Maine. And the Yamanote pulls my friends around from Ikebukuro back to Shibuya. Places continue without us. You may have token that won’t get spent because the little tram that doesn’t need you and never did. And you have a lovely pile of coins because you know there will be a reason to spend Euro and Yen. The places remain. We are temporary guests, nothing more.

Unless we choose to place ourselves in these locations and weave in its scenerry. That’s the rub of traveling. You realize with the full force of a train coming that there are places you may spend copious amounts of time in and never for a moment be settled, and then others… others are home to you.

Because you know the way to get there is not only in the car, but from the laughter of voices that keeps calling you back and forth to come and see a river, a bench, a train station, or even just the view from the second story.