Me. Versailles. 2010. When I started thinking about writing a travel/memoir book.
Here I am. Me. Now. The new-old me. A slow starter! Recently, my final day on anyone’s payroll. Ever. Just over. In any case, I understand people over 80 are not in big demand in the world of work. Although…my first job with the City of Albuquerque was a contract to do something with the newly purchased KiMo Theater AND to manage the public toilets on Civic Plaza. Surely, I’m still qualified for the latter.
Anyway, here I am, for now unemployed. What to do. Blog more, obviously. Sharing my insights concerning pesky aging annoyances, as well as tips for Apocalypse preparation (#1: Stock up on those little jars of Armour Dried Beef—didn’t your mother make what I think in the army was called SOS—pieces of the beef stirred into a white sauce and ladled onto toast)—I loved it—but there won’t be any milk or flour or butter or bread. However, the dried beef will last until Jeff and Elon can get us to the moon.
To launch my new life, I’m making an announcement:
I wrote a book. As some of you know, I’ve actually been working on this book off and on for years. It’s finally finished and at the publishers. The book is called Window Seat: The Story of a Traveling Life. It is part travel narrative/part memoir, and all about journeying, family, and with some dance thrown in.
One of my travel bookshelves today.
Now, imagine Window Seat in their midst.
I’m self-publishing with Archway Publishing, a wing of Simon and Schuster. Don’t know if this was a good decision, but it’s hard to know where to go when one wants an absolutely professional job done, even though you know you haven’t written a best-seller! Hopefully it will be the best-looking travel memoir EVER. My artist friend, Pat, is helping me design a cover which will distract potential buyers from dwelling on the fact there’s little exotic food, absolutely no prayer, and the sex is pretty early on and doesn’t deserve an R rating.
With Window Seat, I’ve told my story as a woman living through over 80 plus decades when our place in society saw some pretty amazing changes for the better. Changes that helped make it possible to get to all the places I went and see the things I saw, and speak to the humans I met there. Window Seat has been such a satisfactory project over the years, especially being that the important pursuits in my life have been travel and dance, often with family (and friends) as an integral component.
My editors asked me who I was writing the book for. I said: my family, people who like to travel, perhaps contemporary dance lovers, but definitely women. The truth: I really wrote it for me. I briefly studied a therapeutic field called narrative therapy as a social work student. It involves “story” in different ways, but the bottom line I took from it is that every single one of us has a story, and to think of our lives as stories is fulfilling and healthy—and, for the lucky among us, fun—on any number of levels.
Selfishly, I wanted to tell my story because, first of all, it’s full of modest, but almost always pleasurable adventures, and I think some people will enjoy reading about them almost as much as I enjoyed having and writing about them. After all, why should so many memoirs be about resolving horrendous issues, and why should so much travel literature be by men?
Every book needs a theme—for my life and for Window Seat, the theme comes from an old WWII song: Far Away Places. I must get permission to include the entire song as an opening to the book but here are the first two verses (eight lines are permissible to copy): Please, please, google this song by Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, or Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow. You won’t really understand unless you do.
Far away places with strange-soundin’ names
Far away over the sea
Those far away places with the strange-soundin names
Are callin’, callin’ me
Goin’ to China or maybe Siam
I want to see for myself
Those far away places I’ve been readin’ about
In a book that I took from a shelf
In case you can see titles, the closest shelves hold my mostly Nordic Noir/British detective volumes…honestly the majority of my library consists of travel and history. Honest!
Other lines that appeal to me particularly include “getting restless whenever I hear the whistle of a train” (actually the sight of big buses, trains, boats, ships, and planes has the same effect).
I’ve been thinking about the acknowledgements page, most especially who I’m going to dedicate the book to…. How’s this: to a mom and dad who let me roam about the nearby woods from the time I was a toddler; to friends and family—all explorers in their own ways; and, perhaps especially, to all those books on so many shelves that have made me want to go to every single place in the Whole Wide World.
I guess my favorite line from Far Away Places is “They call me a dreamer, well maybe I am/ but I want to see for myself.”
(“Far Away Places” is an American popular song. It was written by Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer and published in 1948.)