Three young people, three different dreams, and one aging American tourist.
I heave my carry-on into the overhead bin and prepare to settle into my seat, when I realize I now have a seat mate. When I checked in online the night before, there was no one assigned to the window. As I comment on this fact, the young man with clear azure blue eyes and a length of pale blonde hair sweeping across his face grins. “I’m here now, he says. “Would you like the window seat?”
“No,” I reply, “my cranky joints prefer the extra room the aisle gives me.”
As we await our departure from the Québec City airport to fly to Toronto, we exchange pleasantries. I misjudge his need to talk. I figure he would put in his ear buds to listen to his music and that would be that. Instead, to my surprise, we spend the next two hours sharing stories as only strangers, captive on a small, cramped commuter airplane, are sometimes prone to do.
“I just had the best ten days of my life,” he says. He reveals that he is nineteen years old from a city in Finland with an unpronounceable name. I will call him Mikael since his name is equally difficult to pronounce. He met a young woman on the internet who lives in Québec and they had just met for the first time.
“Now I’m sad,” Mikael says. “I had to leave my girl,” he says with tears glistening in those wonderful blue eyes and threatening to spill down his fair cheeks.
“Ten days,” I think. A much bigger chunk of his life than it is on mine. What were the best ten contiguous days of my life? I’m not sure I can figure that out. Name ten separate days perhaps, but even that would be a stretch in my life that is over three and a half times the length of his.
“Perhaps she could move to Finland,” I offer.
“Then her mom would come too. And I’m not sure I want that,” he says ruefully. “Not that she’s not nice but…” he trails off deep in thought.
We continue to share our stories and the two hours pass quickly. As we taxi to our gate, Mikael says, “You must come to Finland.” “Olet hyvä Matkustelu kumppani. Kiitos.” “You are a good traveling companion. Thank you,” he translates.
With tears in my eyes because his story has deeply touched me, I exit the plane. I head for US customs in preparation for my flight back to Utah thinking about dreams and his dream of love and companionship even though there is an ocean between him and his girl. The world is shrinking, but has it shrunk enough for his dream to come true?
***
Simone is a wisp of a thing in a simple strapless summer dress and sandals with her tawny hair pulled back with tendrils surrounding her face. She is selling exquisite miniature etchings by a local artist. The stall is the first one on the right as I approach. The cobblestone alley is between the tourist information center and a busy restaurant next to a Catholic church. It is my first day in Québec City and it is by far the warmest day I have experienced on my Canadian journey. The cool darkness of the small passageway is inviting.
I pause to admire the work. Copper etchings stamped on paper and then tinted with watercolor, wood block prints of hummingbirds, and original copper etchings beckon. During this first encounter, Simone explains the artist’s techniques to me. I am attracted to the pieces, but since I have only arrived in Québec a few hours before, I opt to explore more of the city’s treasures.
Over the next few days I wander by this passageway often, but there is a man tending the booth and I am mildly disappointed. On my last day in the city, I decide that I want one of the artist’s works. I am pleased to discover that Simone has returned to the stall.
As I stand perusing my choices of the many visual delights, we chat. I comment that I hadn’t seen her again until today. She reveals that she only sells art part-time. She is a singer and entertainer who often works on cruise ships and she is between gigs.
Even as Simone tells me about her dream of finding steady work in the entertainment industry, her sales skills are evident. “I can give you that second piece that you like for only $30 Canadian,” she says. “Are you sure you don’t want it framed?” In the end I choose only one piece and I decline the frame since I don’t want to hassle with glass in my luggage on the way home.
As I complete my purchase, I thank her for sharing both her dreams and her expertise with me. As I stroll slowly back to my hotel, her story sticks with me. Her willingness to subsist selling art while pursuing her musical passions haunts me.
When do we keep going and when do we give up and go in a different direction? That is the question that this encounter brings to mind. This I do know, since the piece is matted using metric measurements, I should have bought the frame!
***
I take a short twenty five kilometer bus ride away from Québec City to the reserve of the Huron-Wendat, one of the many First Nations that reside in Canada. The scenes of the cobblestone streets give way to lush forests. We arrive at the small village of Wendake, the site of the Huron- Wendat museum and resort.
As I stand at the ticket window of the museum considering my options—guided or unguided tour, French or English—a tall slender young man urges me to take the guided English tour. He is obviously of First Nations descent: his thick black hair pulled up in a man bun, his brown muscular shoulders revealed by his tank top, and his long lean legs encased in denim shorts.
“You’ll get two guides for the price of one,” he says with a grin that lights up his dark eyes. I shall call him Anue, Wendat for bear, since he is a descendent of the Bear clan and my aging brain has forgotten his name, but not this handsome specimen of youth that stood before me.
He is training another young man of Welsh and French Canadian descent to conduct the tours. I take the bait. Who could resist spending two hours in the company of such infectious youth? I am the only person on the English speaking tour so I have them to myself.
We tour the museum, explore the long house and its garden, walk into the small village of houses and a church, and then hike to the mill straddling the falls and the river. Along the way we share personal stories. Anue explains that only Huron-Wendat peoples can own property in the town and on the reserve. When he is not sheparding tourists and students around the village, he spends his time deep in the woods, hunting, camping, and fishing like his First Nations ancestors.
He dreams of buying some land and then living off of it. Growing the “three sisters” of beans, squash, and corn in a garden plot, fishing the clear lakes, streams, and rivers, hunting and trapping for meat and fur, much like those that came before him.
Even though he is connected to and knows the modern world, he yearns for the simple life, a life of self-sufficiency and personal connection to the land of his people. This is Anue’s dream, a dream of a way of life.
***
And now for that aging American tourist—I always relish meeting people and interacting with them when I travel. It is one of the main reasons I like to travel solo. I am in less of a bubble of my own making and am more likely to connect with the locals and fellow tourists alike. After I return to Salt Lake City, to do battle with the remainder of the hot summer and prepare for the upcoming season at The Sharing Place, these three particular young people and their dreams continue to preoccupy my thoughts.
In grief work we often talk about the loss of dreams. Losing the dreams that we had as part of our connection with the person who died is as difficult to navigate as the actual death of the person. When a child dies, the parents grieve what might have been. When a child’s parent dies they grieve the graduations, weddings, and the fact that their children will never know their grandparent.
But what about us, the average Baby Boomer? What dreams do we grieve, what dreams are still possible, and do we really need dreams? Are they essential to propelling us forward on our life’s journey or can we build a fulfilling and satisfying life without them? I can only explore these questions through my own personal lens of life experiences to find my own personal truth.
As I examined my former dreams of love, family, and relationships, dreams of careers, and dreams of a lifestyle and compared them to what has actually transpired, it is almost as if I am not the same person. And I this I know, I am not.
Rather than having my own children, I raised someone else’s. Career fields such as childhood grief didn’t even exist when I was in college and grappling with my own cancer diagnosis. Coming from a small city nestled between the Black Hills and the Badlands surrounded by farms, ranches, and reservations, I never dreamed that I would become comfortable and thrive in a large city.
I believe dreams give us hope and shed some light on the future. In the end it’s been about growing and learning from the opportunities and the pain that the universe presented. Sometimes there were major “kicks in the butt” and sometimes there was just a soft whisper. Responding to those moments has made for a more interesting journey then I ever dreamed. The twist and turns, bumps in the road, and the parts of life that felt like I was soaring over earth without an airplane, all brought me to where I am today.
I’ll take the aging American tourist, please!
Currently retired on her own terms, Lois Maxson is a South Dakota transplant who has lived in Salt Lake City for over 28 years. She is honored to witness the grief journeys of hundreds of children and their families at her part-time “heart job” at The Sharing Place.
Though she has explored many natural wonders, man-made monuments and amazing museums, it is the people that she meets while traveling that impact her life the most and bring her joy.
There are still lessons to learn and lessons to teach!
I’m always on the lookout for essays on aging. Do you have a personal essay or a poem on aging you'd like to share? If so, I'd love to read it. Send it my way!
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