Some small words about my father

Maile Black

My father taught me how to travel. No, not “how,” let me be more careful. He taught me to travel. Under his guidance and fine example, I experienced the sound of Russian violins on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the market smells of baguettes and lavender soap in the Luberon, sashimi and hot baths outside Kyoto, and blistering tamale pie in Tijuana. I was four and my brothers were six and eight when our family went on sabbatical. We spent most of the school year in France and traveled around lots of the rest of the world too. Sixteen months, total. My father believed in the kind of travel where you actually spend time in a place and get to know it. We were a couple of months in a chateau in the Loire Valley in northern France, then several more outside Nice on the Riviera; a month in Scotland, three weeks in Japan.

The merry month of May last year was stupid. I turned 42 on the first, which doesn’t really bother me except that it seems so much older than 39, which was the age at which I stepped into a steaming pile of soul-shattering love and lost myself in time and space until I finally got my bearings and stepped back out--last May. But all of it stopped mattering when my father fell and broke his hip on Mother’s Day, and spent the next five days in codeine-surrealized Hell, until they finally were able to perform surgery. He went into cardiac arrest after the surgery, then into a coma, and died the next day.

My father lived in the whole world, not just a small corner of it. And when he conversed and interacted with the world, it was always in an attempt to see where other people had been, and to tease out their stories and tell his own, about diving with barracuda in the Caribbean, or putting out the fires of nasi goreng at dinner parties in Indonesia.

The following travel tales are not always directly about my father or the loss of him, but he raised a happy traveler, so it is to him that I dedicate the blog. Thanks, Daddy. See you in the sparkles on every ocean.