Know-It-All

It is a joke. I tell people, “I know everything. I have read everything. I have been everywhere.”

I repeat: That’s a joke.

I don’t know everything. But I know a lot of trivia. I can answer most questions about history and literature. But I know little about science and nothing about mathematics. I can post a blog, but I have no idea how a computer or television works.

I have not been everywhere. I have not been to Africa or South America. Or Hawaii or Alaska. And, sadly, I did not get to India. I had paid for a trip to see the Taj Mahal last year when it had to be cancelled so that I could begin dialysis.

I will not be traveling any more. But I am constantly surprised when I see places on television or see a picture in a magazine or newspaper, and I say, “I’ve been there!”

Last week a PBS documentary reenacted the capture of the pirate Black Beard on Okracoke Island. I looked for shells on the beach at Okracoke when I visited my friend Betty at Hatteras. She and I became friends when we both lived in Birmingham, Michigan. After her divorce, she moved to Hatteras Island, where she had spent happy vacations and where she bought a house near the ferry to Okracoke.

In the 1980's, when I suffered terrible depressions, I visited Betty, making several long drives from Chicago to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She had no money, living by selling off 20 years accumulation of stuff she bought at garage sales and by the charity of neighbors who brought her fresh fish they caught in the Atlantic. Her enthusiastic attitude toward life always lifted my spirits.

Then this morning I was attracted by a headline on the sports section of the Dallas Morning News. Tony Romo, quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, flew in a private jet from Dallas’s Love Field to Charleston, Illinois, to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at his alma mater, Eastern Illinois University. I also have flown in a private plane to Charleston, Illinois, to attend a function at Eastern Illinois University.

My daughter Martha and her family live in Naperville, Illinois. Her husband, Don, has a pilot’s license, and – sounding like Hyacinth on “Keeping Up Appearances” – they live in a house with a three-car garage, a swimming pool, and an airplane hanger in the backyard.

I was taking their youngest son, Joe, to an Intergenerational Elderhostel. I was amused when Don said to his son, “Take the suitcases out and put them in the plane.” I followed him out the back door and climbed into the small plane (nothing like the jet that took Romo). The runway was at the end of the street. We flew over the patchwork quilt of Illinois farms and landed at the small – well, tiny – airstrip at Charleston.

The week Joe and I spent at the Elderhostel at Eastern Illinois University was a good experience for both of us. We “studied” Abraham Lincoln and visited Amish farms. He got to swim in the pool and made friends with other ten-year-olds. I got to know my grandson.

Since Martha lives in Illinois and I lived in New Mexico, I did not see her family often while her boys were growing up. I did not see Joe until he was over a year old, and had been to Illinois only a few one week visits, until we spent that week, just the two of us, in Charleston.

I had also taken his older brothers, Doug and Ric, to intergenerational Elderhostels. I took Doug to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he discovered the painter Chuck Close, and to Washington, D.C., where we toured the Capitol and saw Mount Vernon. With his brother Ric I was less ambitious. Ric came to New Mexico. At Gallup we saw a Navajo woman weave rugs, and at Roswell, Ric built and flew a rocket.

I hope the boys learned something on these “educational” trips. For me the whole point was to spend one week alone with one of the boys and to get to know him.

That’s what I have learned in all my travels. I always see the unexpected and hear things different from what I had read .in books and promotional brochures. More important than sightseeing is what I learn about people.

(Written in a hurry on Sunday night without correction. Is it okay? I am missing Masterpiece Mystery!)