After the year abroad, I came home and told my parents I wasn’t going to college once I graduated. I would be attending the University of Life. (They couldn’t argue. They were the ones who’d taught me about the importance of travel.) After I finished my senior year, I bought a one-way ticket and a rail pass and set off, with no particular plan, but a growing flicker of hope that if I opened myself up to the world, it would receive me in kind.
I traveled for four months and then settled in Amsterdam, where I knew no one. Strangers offered me a room in their squat. Offered to teach me to speak Dutch and cooked me dinners. I got a job as a maid in a hotel. I learned the language. I found a flat. I met people from everywhere—Ireland, Israel, Surinam, Morocco. I met prostitutes and political refugees. At first they seemed different, and then, as I got to know them, not.
When I finally went to college three years later, I decided to become a journalist, primarily because it was a job that would allow me to keep seeing the world (before journalism, I’d considered becoming a flight attendant). By then, I was addicted to traveling. Not because it was easy. I often trekked alone and on a bare-bones budget. I broke out in hives in the middle of Belgium. I got terrible strep throat in Poland. I spent a terrible night in a stuffy room in Turkey, throwing up from food poisoning. I was often lonely, too cold, too hot, tired, uncomfortable. I had my backpack stolen. My heart broken. My patience tested.
And yet, I loved it. I loved meeting new people who seemed, initially, foreign, different, and then passing through some invisible barrier and seeing that our differences weren’t so great after all. I loved being intimidated by a new place, a new culture—okay, I didn’t love that part—and then a few days later, becoming less intimidated, and then comfortable.
After college, I spent twelve years as magazine journalist, traveling around to increasingly intimidating places—Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Pakistan—and meeting people seemingly different from me, and becoming ever more convinced that though our languages might vary, our cultures might seem irreconcilable, and our religions might be at odds, our similarities were greater than our differences. The people I met wanted to be loved and give love. They wanted their communities to be safe. They wanted better lives for their families. They wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. They wanted to believe in a better world.
Nearly every person I have ever met—from the child soldier to the refugee mother—shared these traits. Probably you do too.
* * *
• • •
Experienced a traveler as I am, I still get nervous before a trip. I can’t sleep. I cry for inexplicable reasons. I imagine worst-case scenarios all the time (it’s actually a handy trait for a novelist, less so for a traveler). Each time I fling myself into some new place, encounter a new culture, a new language, a new currency, a new landscape, a new cuisine, I am convinced something, or everything, will go terribly awry.
Proving myself wrong is the core of why I love to travel. Each time I am embraced and helped or allowed to help and to embrace, I remember all over again. I can choose to see people as others, as threats. Or I can choose to see them as essentially human. I choose the latter and am rewarded every time.
This is why I travel. Not to see museums or beaches or sunsets. But to receive a booster shot of hope.
* * *
• • •
The attacks on 9/11 seemed to be a repudiation of my beliefs, or so the people on TV kept telling me. The world was dangerous. People were different. The warmth I’d experienced was two-faced. My faith was misplaced. The shot of hope was actually a poison pill.
* * *
• • •
My husband and I talked about canceling the trip.
As the days went on, we learned that as we had been meticulously planning our flights—Tonga, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Bangkok, New Delhi, Nairobi—a group of terrorists had been meticulously plotting much shorter flights. We learned that as we were grieving in New York City, people half a world away were cheering. We learned that battle lines had been drawn. Enemies we didn’t even know we had were unmasked. The destinations that had seemed so exciting to us before—not just the places on the round-the-world ticket we’d bought but the places we planned to go in between, like Kazakhstan and Yemen and Zanzibar—seemed, from the TV at least, like cauldrons of hatred and danger.
I wanted to cancel. I was scared. After the year I’d had, hope seemed in short supply. And I didn’t want to cancel. Because after the year I’d had, I needed hope more than ever.
* * *
• • •
Spoiler: We went.
* * *
• • •
That year abroad wasn’t perfect. I fought with my husband, a lot. I got sick in China, again in India, and once more in France. I missed my friends from home. I missed my routine. I missed having a sense of purpose. But all in all, it was a wonderful year and, maybe more important, a healing one. Because in spite of the terrible things I’d seen on TV, in the markets, the bazaars, the plazas, the mountains, the back alleys, the tea shops, the world remained much as it had been. It had its share of bad people, its share of scammers, but they were the exceptions. Mostly people were as I’d always encountered them: kind, generous, willing to show visitors respect and sometimes even love.
I met a whole new crop of strangers who became friends. Visited a whole new lot of intimidating places that became, if not home, then home away from home. I got scared plenty of times, often when boarding a plane to the next place that according to the news was on the verge of catastrophe. But aside from the times I was in a minibus or taxi, taking a steep curve at sixty miles an hour, I never thought I was in danger.
Maybe this was because as a white American, I had that privilege. I was traveling on a shoestring budget, but I had an emergency credit card that could whisk me out of a truly dicey situation, an American passport that would allow me safe haven to many places. I am well aware, particularly at this point in time, that this is a luxury not shared by all.
But maybe it was because I wasn’t really in danger. On TV, terrible things continued to happen. New terrorist threats. A buildup to a war. But on the ground, in the places I was visiting, it was just people, who were sometimes bad but mostly good, getting on with life.
* * *
• • •
The year abroad gave me hope at a time when I needed it most. Not because everything was perfect. The world has never been perfect. Conflict is woven into our history just as much as progress. There have always been men who believe the righteousness of their ideals justifies no end of violence. There have always been leaders who foment fear to solidify their power.
But the year showed me that healing was possible. That even in the face of devastation, there was renewal. And that people were as I had believed them to be. Not perfect, but trying to be better. Kind of like me.
Perhaps most important, the year showed me that no matter what happened, no matter how large the devastation or grief, life went on.
* * *
• • •
Life goes on.
* * *
• • •
Fifteen years pass since 9/11, since our trip. One terror group is replaced by another. Grim headlines continue. I have two children. I change careers. The world becomes wary, then angry.
Though I travel a lot for work, I haven’t undertaken one of those big, fling-yourself-into-adventure trips. Not because the world has grown more dangerous—though the TV and Internet would have you believe otherwise—but because I had children, and the prospect of globe-trotting with them as ornery youngsters was a terror I could never overcome.
But in 2016 my husband and I decided it was time and began planning a big trip with the whole family: England, France, Israel, the West Bank, Ethiopia, and Kenya for the following summer.
Our itinerary was like a Where’s Wal
do of trouble spots. England, which in 2017 alone saw the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester and the van attack on London Bridge. Paris, which has been the site of several attacks over the last few years. Israel, a hotbed of unrest, and the West Bank, if you believe the media reports, a hive of suicide bombers. Ethiopia, which was under a state of emergency, and Kenya, which the State Department warned us we probably should not visit.
If the world looked bleak on TV in 2001, it looked like Doom according to TV, websites, and Twitter now. I had a moment of doubt. Had things really changed this time? Had humanity gone off? My kids were only nine and thirteen. Was I pushing them into harm’s way because I was itchy to dust off my backpack? Because I wanted to teach them a lesson, about the importance of travel? Because I wanted to prove to them—or re-prove to myself—that fear is not a foregone conclusion but a decision? Because I was desperate to believe that in spite of the dispiriting headlines, the attacks that now seemed so commonplace were still exceptional, the people who perpetrated them outliers whose terrible deeds were exaggerated by traditional and social media and by leaders bent on stoking fear? Because I wanted them to understand that the world broadcast on TV was a distortion, about as accurate a portrayal of how human beings live as, say, the Kardashians?
And even if this was a lesson I wanted to impart, did I have to drag them halfway around the world? After all, you don’t need to get a passport to understand the disconnect between the world on TV or the Internet and the actual world in which human beings dwell. You simply need to turn off the screen, step outside your comfort zone, your bubble, to go to a new neighborhood for a walk or a new church for services, to talk to someone different from you. To breathe through that moment of fear and uncertainty and come out the other side.
* * *
• • •
In the end, dear reader, we went traveling. Because I wanted to introduce my girls to the world as I believed it and because it was time for them to start receiving their hope inoculations (along with those for typhoid and yellow fever they had to get before we left).
It’s a strong shot of medicine. The boosters I’ve gotten through the years of travel stay with me, swim through my blood, remind me, with every grim headline, that though the world seems to be changing in dizzying, disheartening ways, it remains, in some essential way, as I’ve always known it. It gives me the strength to breathe through the fear, to cross over to the other side.
The other side is where hope lives.
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ
Baseball Pasta
IT WAS A WARM SUMMER evening, and the sun was sinking past the horizon, creating a swirl of bright pink, orange, and purple streaks in the sky. The red clay of the infield was framed by the tall chain-link fence that separated the bleachers from the players, and the lights had already come on. Farther in the distance, past the outfield, were the pine trees that covered most of the county. Those trees were our town’s claim to fame . . . We were the Pine Tree Capital of the South. A pulp and paper mill town where most people were, in one way or another, connected to the mill . . . including my family. My dad’s job was the reason I was born in Perry . . . the only Hispanic girl in that small North Florida town.
The crowd cheered as the ballplayers took the field. My mother waved to my dad, the third baseman, and he smiled and tugged the rim of his cap. My grandfather had already taken his regular spot along the fence while the players started their warm-ups. It was the church softball league, and the players were the fathers, brothers, and sons of the people in the stands. The game would soon start, and I couldn’t have cared less.
Although that hadn’t always been the case.
At one point, I dreamed of being the first girl on the team, but that idea quickly ended when I misjudged a fast pitch and got whacked in the head. And that happened when I was just playing catch with my dad in the backyard! Earning that golf-ball-sized bump on my forehead made me realize that playing softball was not for me, but my dad still insisted I learn about every sport. So, there I was, sitting on the bleachers next to my mother, little sister, and grandmother, getting ready to cheer for Leo’s Lions. My little sister was even wearing her Leo’s Cubs shirt, but I thought myself way too cool for that sort of thing. Instead, I had on my light pink T-shirt with a glittery rainbow painted across the front.
“Hoy voy a gritar como los Americanos,” Abi, my grandmother, whispered as she leaned closer to me.
My eyebrows scrunched together. What did she mean, she was going to yell like the Americans? What was my grandmother up to?
“Abi . . .” My voice quivered a little. I had an uneasy feeling about this.
But she brushed off my concern. She told me in Spanish that she’d been paying attention during the games and that, although she didn’t understand why the fans liked pasta so much, she was going to join in the cheering this time.
Pasta? At a ball game?
Now I was really confused. What could she have possibly heard to make her think that people talked about pasta during a baseball game? The only things they sold here were hot dogs, Cracker Jack, and candy.
“Hey, Christina!” a voice in the distance interrupted my thoughts.
My friend Angela was standing by the concession stand, waving at me. She was next to several of my classmates, and I could tell that was the place to be.
Thoughts of my grandmother, pasta, and baseball disappeared as the more pressing thoughts of being with my friends took over. “Mami, I’m going to hang out with my friends for a while, okay?” I scooted toward the edge of the bleachers to make my quick getaway.
“I want to go too!” my little sister declared.
I widened my eyes at my mom, silently begging her not to make me bring her along. Three-year-olds did not mix well with the sophistication of middle schoolers.
“Not today,” my mom told her, “but Christina will bring back some Cracker Jack for you.” She gave me a wink.
“Thank you,” I mouthed as she handed my grandmother a dollar to pass to me.
“Ten cuidado,” my grandmother said, reminding me to be careful as if walking around the baseball field might somehow be dangerous. Then again, she also wanted me to always wear a sweater if there was even the slightest evening breeze, so it wasn’t an unusual request, coming from her.
I gave a small wave in acknowledgment, jumped off the bleachers, and hit the ground running.
By the time I returned with a half-eaten box of Cracker Jack, the game was about to start. My plan was to drop off the snack and then run back to spend the rest of the game with my friends.
As I was handing the box to my sister, the loudspeaker crackled.
“Please stand for our national anthem,” the announcer said.
On the field the players from both teams were already lined up, their caps over their hearts.
As the first few notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, everyone in the stands stood up and put their hands on their chests. There was no way I could leave now. It would be a sign of disrespect to the country that had welcomed my family when their own country had been lost. I could see my grandfather no longer slouching against the fence, but standing straight and facing the flag that flapped in the distance.
As the music ended and the crowd clapped, the announcer called out, “Play ball!”
That was my sign to take off. But before I could make a clean getaway, Abi grabbed my arm.
“Mira,” she said. Watch.
I froze. It was too late to stop her.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted . . . “LINGUINE!”
/> Linguine? The pasta? That’s what my grandmother, with her heavy Cuban accent, had decided to shout at the start of a baseball game?
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have surprised me that she wanted to participate in the game. My grandmother was not one to sit quietly on the sidelines. She loved life and believed you had to act in order to shape your own destiny. It was obvious from her life experiences.
Abi didn’t understand or speak much English, but living in a town where no one spoke Spanish never slowed her down. She had a smile for everyone and a loving embrace for those she knew. There was an attitude about her that said anything could be overcome . . . with hope and action. “Haz bien y no mires a quien,” she used to tell me, which loosely translates to “Do good and don’t worry who it’s for.” It was one of her life mottos, and it was something she expected us all to live by as well.
When she was younger, Abi had lived a relatively easy upper-middle-class life. That all changed with the Communist Cuban Revolution of 1959.
Cuba, the country she loved, quickly changed. The false promises of helping the poor and social equality came at a great cost. Private property was confiscated for government use. Newspapers were shut down. Freedom of the press was outlawed. And anyone speaking against the government could be arrested or, worse, sent to the paredon . . . the firing wall. Just like that, fundamental rights disappeared under the guise of the revolution.
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