On the Road

Detox Monday: Today’s breakfast is a juice made with 1 fennel (I used the entire fennel, both bulb and leaves) and two d’Anjou pears. The fennel lends the juice quite an intense licorice taste, so if you don’t like that, then cut back on the fennel and increase the amount of pears instead. Or vice versa.

I’ve always loved road movies; movies in which the characters for one reason or another, leave home and hit the road, travel from place to place and change in some profound way. My favorite is David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

I think I am attracted to this genre of movies, because, in a way, my life has been a bit of a road movie. The reason for this is my mother, who loved – and still loves – to travel. She was a single parent quite early on, and we didn’t have a lot of money when I grew up, but we always traveled. Charter trips were enormously popular in Sweden in those days, and we visited a number of places in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, Austria…  I was also encouraged to travel by myself. I spent several summers Interrailing, backpack style, through Europe on my own.

But traveling wasn’t enough for my mother. The small town in which we lived was much too stale for her, geographically it was off too, not near any bigger cities, and not much ever happened. For years, she schemed and planned for us to get out. The only way seemed to be through education, since my mom had had none in her younger years. So she applied to university, and when she was accepted, she packed our stuff, loaded the car, a mustard-colored Opel Kadett, and off we took in a cloud of dust! We were both excited and I don’t remember any fear. When I was with my mother, I was never afraid anyway. And we never looked back.

Education was how you engaged your mind, and traveling and moving and seeing other places was how you engaged your soul, this was my mother’s parental motto. She put the bit in my mouth and told me to “Run!” even though I was, and am, quite reticent by nature. She instilled in me that the chance not taken posed a far greater risk than the chance taken. And the risk, this was so evident to her, was not in the leave-taking, but in the stalemate of the staying.

My mother found philosophical “proof” for her theory in Søren Kierkegaard’s quote “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” This quote spurred her to further action. When she was in her fifties she spent a sabbatical year in Atlanta, Georgia and soon afterwards, back home, she took up studies in Egyptology.

We may all wonder what it would have been like if we had been born under different circumstances, in a different time, to different parents, with a different set of talents, in a different country, maybe with a silver spoon in our mouth. I reckon the latter is supposed to mean “with money”, which was something we never had much of. But in truth, I don’t think my mother ever valued money much. It wasn’t what motivated her. And she proved that a good life, a life that teaches you something, really has very little to do with money. 

On the road with Mamma: North Africa in the 1970’s.