FOR MY FATHER

My father was partial to maps. It used to embarrass me anytime anyone who had been anywhere remotely outside county limits came to visit, and my father would pull out the atlas. He wanted to understand the where of where they had been. Once he found the locus in question, he would ask a lot of questions. Intelligent questions, almost as if he had been there himself. My father didn’t travel much, but he had a traveler’s turn of mind, curious and flexible. He took his most far-flung trips straight out of college: to China, where he was stationed during World War II, in Yunnan Province, and to Mexico, on a road trip with a war buddy in a Studebaker. He talked about those trips, about Dali, about Kunming, about Taxco, about the art deco architecture in Mexico City.

He planted the seeds.

The only foreign city I visited with my father was Montréal. My parents had driven up from Connecticut, I’d flown in from Washington. We stayed one night in The Inter-Continental, on the edge of Vieux Montréal, before driving south to my father’s cousin’s farm, in upstate New York, for a family reunion. Joe Cocker was staying at the hotel, too. We (my parents and I, we never made Joe's acquaintance) poked around Vieux Montréal. We ate at a place called Le Resto-Bar des Gouverneurs on Place Jacques Cartier. I only know this because the paper placemat I’d folded into eighths, with line drawings of people, very French, fell out of my guidebook earlier this week.

In the summer of 2000, my father, my son and I went to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, for two days. (My mother stayed behind to work. She was the Democratic registrat that year.) For those partial to maps, and, as I’ve indicated, my father was very partial to maps, Cape Ann juts out from the Massachusetts coast like an oversize apostrophe. We stayed at The Emerson Inn by the Sea, in Rockport (www.emersoninnbythesea.com), in E-Room 308. I know the room number because I inadvertently kept one of the room keys. It’s on an old oval key ring, maybe brass, with the room number imprinted into the metal, a travel artifact.

We went on a whale watch (www.captainbillswhalewatch.com). It was foggy, classic, nerve-racking pea-soup fog. “I love the water,” my father said on the way out. We saw three species of whale: a North Atlantic humpback, a right and a minke. The humpback gently lifted his flap towards our boat, as if to acknowledge us. Or perhaps shoo us away.

At the end of the cruise, the captain gave away a door prize, two tickets for another whale watch. In a brush with travel contests, my father won.

The next summer, my father, my mother, my son and I went to Liberty Hill Farm (www.libertyhillfarm.com), a working diary farm in central Vermont. My father had just celebrated his eightieth birthday. Fittingly, there were 80 cows, though not for long, one cow was on the verge of labor. We hoped the calf might come while we were there, but it did not. My son, who was about to turn six, loved playing in the hay loft. My father, who’d spent summers on his cousin’s farm in upstate New York, and mother, who’d spent summers in Vermont, loved sitting on the front porch.

I’m so grateful for those trips. A year ago yesterday, my mother, siblings and I were keeping vigil around my father’s deathbed. My mother asked each of us to share a memory. Out of the blue, I remembered a moment from family road trip, to Florida, to Disney World, in 1976. We were driving home along I-95 in our sky-blue station wagon, not the Pontiac Safari – great name for a car, that one – but the one after that. You know those highway signs that read, EXIT HERE. That’s all they say. The orienting information is on other signs. Well, my father did what the sign said. He exited there, onto a road in the middle of the nowhere. My mother asked him where he was going. He said, “The sign said ‘Exit Here.’” We instantly understood that he’d absentmindedly responded to the imperative. We have a huge laugh, the whole family, in the self-contained universe of the car.

Maybe you had to be there.

I wish my father were still here.

He passed away that night.

Safe travels, Dad.