So much depends

Can constraints set you free?

If I ever get back to Massachusetts to hang out with my canine pals, Utah and Miss Otis, I must remember to take the train into Boston, see if I can’t get a look at the prescription pads of William Carlos Williams at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Literary lore has it that the physician-poet wrote his piercingly concise poems—and other notes—on prescription pads between sessions with patients.

I suspect today’s doctors might be prohibited from scribbling on prescription pads as if they were common notebooks. Source: Beinecke Library

I have felt like a traveller for most of my life, but it took me a long time to become a person who travels. At university age, I watched my friends seize their young adulthood to explore. Meanwhile, I dropped out of an English degree to train for a job I thought would be more secure. I’d hear stories from my friends who took teaching jobs in Quebec or Korea, cruise ship jobs that took them to ports all over the world. Some did Katimavik, living and working in communities elsewhere in Canada, some joined WWOOF and worked on farms elsewhere in the world. I was “not in a position” to travel: things would be different if only I had the funds, if only I had the safety net of working parents.

By my decades-old assessment, I’m still not in a position to travel. At supper last night, I caught myself ad-libbing my perfect-world travel scenario. Here’s what I came up with: I land a gig with the Roy family on Succession and housesit their villa in the south of France. Not buying or renting a villa of my own, but sitting for a fictitious family of sociopaths. A girl can dream.

Tis the season to give your travel-loving friends a gift subscription.