A trip to the dentist should always be followed by an activity that a person really wants to do. Since the clinic was just a stone’s throw from my favorite little coffee shop, I stopped there on my way home.When I adjusted the lid on my coffee cup and searched the room for a seat, a slender older woman waved me over to her table.
“Want to join me,” she said boldly, eyes sparkling with promise of a new friendship.
“If you can overlook the preoccupation I’m having with my teeth,” I replied, feeling the sticky fluoride treatment which coated the surface of my teeth.
“My name is Alice, like Alice of Alice in Wonderland,” my new companion announced.
We jumped into our personal histories, and whenever Alice smiled it was easy to see the girl from Bakersville, California. This woman was a soul mate.
Alice began her life in California, married Thomas –a budding expert in the research world of insects–moved to Texas, and adopted two lovely children from the Fort Worth area. She lovingly explained the roots of the Edna Gladney Center for Adoption which has received babes and young mothers since the days of Westward Expansion.
Somewhere between Texas and Missouri, Alice and her husband Thomas agreed to a year-long foreign exchange to the country of Germany where their family of four toured around in a yellow Volkswagen bug.
I asked her if she ever wrote about her year abroad.
“Unfortunately, I never kept a journal and the memories are fading,” she replied.
“Those memories could be resurrected and recorded as keepsakes for your family,” I reassured her. “A personal historian is all you need.”
Through the decades, Alice accompanied her husband to many nations of the world. I shared briefly of our years in Mongolia. Yes, she had been there too. When she mentioned that she almost put her feet on the continent of Antarctica, I couldn’t refrain from letting out an exuberant, “You didn’t!”
Then she referenced piles of yellow magazines in their home by the name of National Geographic, and I connected immediately to the shelves in my father’s den of our home growing up. I had never thought about those glossy illustrations as part of my personal history, my love affair with the cultures of the world. I never read a single article but could say with confidence that I looked at every photograph of every issue from 1965 to 1990.
Recently, Thomas announced to Alice that National Geographic was offering a world tour and they were going to take it. They will depart not long after Christmas 2016. Yes, I am jealous.
“How did you start writing,” Alice asked.
“My first short story was about a family in the bomb shelters in London during the raids of WWII. I wrote that one in college, but then I got married and children came. The next three decades were spent raising my kids, teaching others to read and write and to speak English well, to help out in our home church and to write short dramas, and curriculum. When I was a teenager, I promised myself I’d write a book someday.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, the plot features my daughter Mary. She’s showcased as a baker-slash-entrepreneur. The book was supposed to be witty and light, but it turned into a book on human trafficking.”
“Oh, my,” Alice said with depth of feeling.
“It’s not what I planned, but it’s where the book went.”
Isn’t it true that the best journeys are rarely planned? Take today for example, I was going to write for an hour at the coffee shop before heading home. Instead, I met a new friend who loves the world as much as I do, a woman who is about to circumnavigate the world with the experts in charge of every detail. However, I believe the best parts of their trip will be the ones where she calls out to a stranger with, “Want to join me?”
Further Reading: Examples of personal history in essay form
