Dreaming of Europe

During World War II our family lived in a big, brick “Dutch colonial” house on Cooper Street in Fort Worth. With five bedrooms, Mother rented out two of them.
Mildred, who lived in our house throughout the war, left for work early each morning, taking a bus to the “bomber plant.” building planes to fly over Germany and bomb their cities into rubble.

In addition to the trauma of the war – all the young men were fighting in the Pacific or in Italy – polio was rampant in Fort Worth. Swimming pools were closed, and parents were told to keep their children at home. As a teenager, I was considered a child.

I spent the long, hot summers in my parents bedroom, sitting in my great-grandmother’s rocker beside the back window, hoping to catch a cool breeze - 100 degrees and no air-conditioning - and reading National Geographic.

Someone gave my mother all the issues of the Geographic back to 1926. The magazines had their own bookcase, three shelves of lurid yellow with black lettering on their tattered spines. Illustrations in the early issues were black and white photos, but in later years the magazines had special color sections. I remember Hungarian folk dancers wearing bright red boots. How I wished I could see those dancers!

I dreamed of seeing all of Europe, but that summer it was blowing up, burning up, disappearing under heaps of twisted steel girders and fallen bricks and stones Would there be anything left after the war? In 1943 we could not see an end to the war, much less the rebuilding of Europe afterwords.

I dreamed. I cut a map of Europe out of the newspaper. The purpose of the map was to show countries occupied by Germans. I ignored that. With a fountain pen I marked out a trip, starting in Paris and going down the Loire River and over the Pyrenees to Spain, than back across Southern France to Italy, and so on. Yes, going to Hungary and looping back to end in the Netherlands.

A lot happened to me between 1943 and 1983, when I finally took my “Dream Trip”, forty years after I spent that lonely summer in my parents’ bedroom reading magazines. I drove all over Western Europe in my new BMW. What an adventure! Worth waiting for.