Last night we had a lovely breeze for the concert, and that cool air hung around for a while, but today is going to be hot and humid again. For a change, though, I’ll be happy to abide today’s temperature and grouse less as starting tomorrow it should stay in the 70’s for a bit.

I remember exactly how my dream, my hope, maybe even my expectation, of seeing the world started. I remember being eleven and thinking my geography book was a travel brochure. That was around the same time I caught Barrett’s disease. Its main symptom is travel envy. My classmate, whose last name was Barrett, used to go to England to visit family. I was jealous of him. It was then I vowed to travel far and wide.

On my first morning in Ghana, I saw palm trees. They were exotic and proof I was somewhere I had only imagined. I had jumped into my geography book. I had jumped into Africa.

My longest trip was through South America. I was gone all summer. I landed in Caracas and seven weeks later I left from Rio for home. I didn’t know anyone who had gone there. I just decided that’s where I would go. Maybe Juan Valdez had a piece of that. I planned the trip and traveled with a friend. We saw amazing things. We took a bus from Caracas and traveled all day with a stop for lunch in the mountains. I had mountain trout. We arrived at night to Mérida, Venezuela, one of the main cities of the Venezuelan Andes. The mountains would stay with us most of the trip.

I remember in Bogota we went to the Gold Museum. We were in a vault. The door was closed. The lights were out. When they turned on the lights, we were surrounded by glass cases filled with gold. I think every person Oohed at the same time.

One of my favorite memories is of when we were traveling in Ecuador on what was basically a school bus painted green. We were the only foreigners on it. No one spoke English. We were stopped before the border. The guards wanted our passports. We were in the back of the bus. The other passengers took our passports and hand over hand passed them to the front of the bus and back again. No one spoke to us. They pointed.

We traveled before South America became a destination. During that whole trip we met only one other American. Even at Machu Picchu there were no crowds. We took a three day boat trip down the Paraná River from Asuncion Paraguay to Buenos Aires. We booked the day the boat left. There was plenty of room. For the other passengers it was a round trip. Only one other person on the boat spoke English, and they courteously put us at her table for meals.

I have memories of that trip as big as the mountains and as small as cuy, the Ecuadorian Guinea pig.

We’re still stuck in the mid 80’s, but the day is hazy, cloudy. The breeze is strong at times. I feel subdued. My muse is napping on the couch oblivious to my pleas for help, for inspiration. Last week I mostly stayed home. My most exciting trip was to the dump. How sad!

Henry came in the dog door twice yesterday. He stuck his head in the door, checked around, made some noises, then decided to go it alone. The key, I’ve found, is to wait him out, but I usually give in first as he sounds so plaintive, even abandoned. He knows how to work me.

My mother taught me how to play jacks. I used to get a set of them in my Easter basket and my Christmas stocking. We’d sit on the floor and play. We used to keep track of where we were by calling the steps onesie, twosies, threesies and on from there to tensies. The key was in how you threw the jacks: the higher numbered the turn, the closer the jacks needed to be to each other. I remember the next rounds added different steps. One was clicking the jacks after you picked them up.

We were a game family. Every Christmas we always got new games. We always played both board and card games. My parents taught my brother and me whist when we were young. We had girls’ versus boys’ tournaments. We girls usually won. My favorite game was Sorry. Nothing was better than sending an opponent’s man back to start. We were never sorry. I have the game Go to the Head of the Class, the exact one we used. The board has rows of desks and the desks have colors indicating the type of questions. You move up the board to the head of the class when you answer questions correctly. The questions are different levels of difficulty so we could play with my parents. I loved the names of the pieces like Cowboy Joe, Dimples, Butch and Buttercup. My parents always used the Mommy and Daddy pieces.

The Christmas boxes my mother sent me when I was in Ghana always had a game or two in them. We played Password so many times we knew all the words on all the cards. We competed in paddle ball every night after dinner. You know the one, the wooden paddle with the red rubber ball on an elastic. We were devastated when the elastic broke. We played word games with pen and paper. We entertained ourselves.