Where It All Started

 

The woman sitting beside me in the hotel breakfast room leaned over and pointed at my glasses.

 

“Your glasses are taint blue,” she said.

 

“Excuse me?” I answered, putting down my croissant. We were at the Hotel Bernini Palace in Florence. I was alone but she was sitting across from her husband, who was bent over his iPhone.

 

“Haint blue,” I heard this time.

 

“Haint like in haunt, like a ghost?” I asked. It sounded like a word out of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, my childhood favorites.

 

“Yes, that’s what they call the color in New Orleans.” She said this with a slight southern accent.

 

“Oh,” I said. “Sort of a blue-green?”

 

“Yes. They paint windows and doors that color to ward off evil spirits,” she told me.

 

I thanked her for sharing this interesting tidbit. I do love collecting fun facts and meeting new people while traveling.

 

“I just love New Orleans,” she said. “My husband and I go there every few years.” She sighed happily and looked across at her husband, who ignored her comment.

 

“I’ve only been once,” I told her. “When I was ten.”

 

“Ten! And you’ve never been back?” She scooted her chair closer.

 

I shook my head. “No. It was the perfect trip. Why ruin a wonderful memory by going back?”

 

I went on to tell her that after my parents divorced, my single mother took me and my younger sister to New Orleans in 1966. “Everybody told her she was nuts. ‘Why, Marthann, what are you thinking? Taking those girls to New Orleans? In August?’ I guess it was nuts, but we loved it. My mom’s single cousin Betty Ann came along. It was a real girls road trip.”

 

“What did you do in New Orleans?” she asked, tipping her head slightly and looking skeptical. I guess she was picturing us carousing on Bourbon Street.

 

“We stayed at a small boutique hotel called the Place des Arms. Right across from Jackson Square, next to the cathedral. Our room had a balcony at the corner. In the mornings, my sister and I would run down the street to Café du Monde and buy a bag of beignets for breakfast.”

 

“Your mother let you go alone?”

 

“Well, she and Betty Ann watched us from the balcony. I’m sure it was perfectly safe at the time.” I felt the need to defend my mother, even though I could see this woman’s point. But I’d felt safe as a kid.

 

“We also ate out at fancy restaurants. Lunch at Court of the Two Sisters, where I had crepe suzettes. At Brennans, I ate hearts of palm for the first time. There was a place pronounced Two Jacks where I ate fried oysters.”

 

“You must be thinking of Tujague’s,” she said and spelled it for me. I nodded.

 

“At the Commander’s Palace the waiter cut up my little sister’s meat, and she left him a dime tip.” I laughed.

 

“One restaurant had mirrors everywhere. The four of us were completely sunburned, just burnt to a crisp, from a day on a boat on the Mississippi, and we were so embarrassed to see our red faces reflected everywhere. Galatoires!” I said, snapping my fingers as the name came to me.

 

“I can’t believe you remember all that,” she said. To her husband, she said, “Did you hear that? She went to New Orleans when she was ten and still remembers everything.”

 

He looked up from his iPhone and gave me a polite nod.

 

“That trip made a huge impression on me,” I told her. “I remember sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, writing postcards to my family and friends in Missouri. I just knew this is what Paris would look like: cobblestones, black wrought-iron railings, artists drawing portraits of tourists. I decided when I grew up, I would go to Paris.”

 

“And did you?”

 

“I did. Several times, in fact.”

 

After she and her husband left, I ordered another cappuccino and reflected on how the New Orleans trip had catapulted me out of my cozy corner of Missouri and sparked a love of travel and exploration that has lasted sixty years.

 

Would I even have been in Florence, Italy sixty years later if it hadn’t been for that first taste of travel when I was ten? At that point, I’d been to spots in Missouri like Hannibal (Mark Twain’s hometown), Jefferson City (the capital), and Lake of the Ozarks. New Orleans felt like a foreign country.

 

One trip led to another. The next year I went on a school trip to DC, Virginia, and Maryland. Then in high school my Girl Scout troop took a two-week trip to Colorado, and then the next summer we traveled to DC, New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec.

 

My sophomore year in college I joined 50 fellow Brown University chorus members in a month-long concert tour of India, visiting Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Calcutta, Agra, Rishikesh, and Nepal. Later I spent a semester in Israel volunteering on two kibbutzim and on the way home, visited Paris and London for the first time.

 

Then there was the trip with a girlfriend to France and Italy after college. Other trips to France and England with my husband. Too many trips to Mexico to even count.

 

While I was working, I traveled to Munich many times, and made business trips to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan, often traveling alone.

 

My bucket list just gets longer all the time.

 

But New Orleans is not on that list. As I told my breakfast companion, it was the perfect trip, and no return visit would equal my first trip.

 

What I didn’t tell her was this: that the New Orleans trip took us through Memphis on the way and back, and for some reason, my mother fell in love with Memphis. In September she took her first plane flight, back to Memphis, where she found a job and an apartment.

 

A month later I was the new kid in Miss Patterson’s 5 th grade class, where my ignorant classmates taunted me as a damn Yankee. I told them that Yankees lived in New York and New England, not Missouri. They were disappointed that Missouri hadn’t joined the Confederacy. Only when I told them Missouri had been a slave state did they leave me alone. That was the start of many years living in Memphis that were anything but fun.

 

So when I think of New Orleans, it’s hard not to think of Memphis, too. But I still thank my mother for that trip to New Orleans. Without that trip, I might not have had the courage to leave Memphis and go to Rhode Island for college. Without that childhood trip, I might not have become the curious and fearless traveler I became as an adult. Without that trip, I might have been vacationing at Lake of the Ozarks instead of the Hotel Bernini Palace in Florence, sporting my haint-blue glasses.