Traveling with Mom

    Less than twenty-four hours before I was leaving home for this trip, Mom and I were scrambling to finalize our plans for meeting up. She was planning to attend a conference in Hungary starting a week after my program in Jerusalem finished. If she were to fly out a week early, we could meet somewhere and travel together. Ultimately we settled on Israel – so that I would have one fewer flight to Turkey, and mom would have an expert travel guide.

     We’re about five days into our travels together, and I’ve settled on a positive verdict. I hadn’t been worried about traveling with just Mom for such a prolonged period, but curious. As it turns out we are admirable travel partners, and in many ways it’s proved an interesting experience.

     Having traveled the past two months in a new country, with new people, doing new things, at times I’ve worried that I could have changed drastically and not have noticed. Traveling with Mom has soundly re-oriented me. On one hand, the ways in which she and I are different have provided this comfort. Until being with Mom all the time again, I had begun to think I have turned into a worrier. As it turns out, I am not – at least in comparison to Mom. Her anxieties range from sensible to absurd (“Mom – I promise we’re not in the West Bank. Look, there are some more Israeli flags.”) Maybe just the knowledge that Mom has the worrying under control has made me carefree, but I am by no means an anxious person.

     In more ways, traveling together makes glaringly obvious the ways in which we are the same. To a large extent, it’s a matter of preferences. Some of these preferences are incidental, but amusing to note. We share a distaste for onions, as well as bathing suits. (Notice our matching tank top/gym shorts outfits). We both habitually write in cursive. We share a different sort of sense of humor, I think. Illustrative story:

Mom tells, “If I ever knocked on a door to ask who was behind it, Pappap would answer, ‘Yehudi!’ I never understood who Yehudi was and would ask, ‘Well, where is he from?’ ‘Shikshinny!’

Well, I never understood about Yehudi, but now I realize that he must actually be from Israel.”

Mom’s colorful anecdotes had us both in stitches driving along the Golan Heights.

     It can be rather trying to arrange plans around several disparate preferences, and due to our similar priorities Mom and I had no such problem. Immediately apparent was our shared value in gastronomic experiences. Especially, we are always on the lookout for an opportunity to stop for coffee, tea, or wine. One such spontaneous wine-stop occurred in the midst of our obligatory souk-shopping afternoon. Impatient with tourist-jaded rosary-sellers, we dealt with them at top-speed, stopping only for a leisurely glass of wine in the Austrian Hospice gardens. Our similar attitudes toward the relative value of shopping and consumption of food and beverage smooth spontaneous decision-making.

     A lot of our similarities stem from a notion Mom invented, familiar to her family and now several of my friends, of ‘graded activities.’ Over time I have come to accept this model of potential activity analysis as well. The spectrum of low- to high-grade activities runs from video games to museums. Museums are the highest grade, most especially of art. Eating can be high up, shopping is pretty low down. Beaches are usually low-grade. People watching is moderately high-grade, to a certain extent. Going for a drive is surprisingly high-grade, as well as most walks (through swamps included). Anything having to do with nuns is trump-grade (Mom and I both harbor secret desires to become nuns and live in mountain monasteries.  I would be the beekeeping nun and Mom could be the teacher nun).  

    This ladder of priorities helped us immensely planning out our week. While a visit to the Dead Sea was necessary and worthwhile, we made just a short trip to avoid sun-fatigue. Instead of whiling away the afternoon baking on the sand (eek!), we cleaned up and headed north for a drive around the Sea of Galilee at sunset.

     A whole afternoon on the other hand was spent at the Israel Museum, where we sped through the nauseatingly symbolic ‘Shrine of the Book’ to the art wings, which were extraordinary (check out William Kentridge). The first part of that day in Jerusalem was spent at the Shuk (Jewish produce market), which coincides with my personal prioritization of vegetables, and conveniently agrees with Mom’s contentedness with people-watching.

     Our shared interest in and attraction to Catholic things was most relevant for this trip. One night we stayed at a convent, where we pretended we were nuns, and even considered working in silence. We speculated about a nun-initiate we met, and fantasized that we would wake up early enough for 7:15 mass. Our morning in the Old City we spent a good amount of time at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where we reviewed the last four stations of the cross, and gawked at the giant candlestick. Later in the week we had our ‘pilgrim day’, where we saw the churches of Nazareth (most spectacularly the Basilica of the Annunciation, celebrating Mary) and then drove up Mt. Tabor, the site of Jesus’ Transfiguration. My relationship with Catholicism sits somewhere between bemusement and fondness, rendering pilgrim activities a constant if unattached pleasure. 

    Taken out of our usual student-daughter-young person/adult-mother contexts and placed on more equal footing as co-travelers, Mom and I found out the things we have in common. What fun! It’s been a nice week.