Excerpts From My Failed Travel Notebook
My summer in Europe was full of remarkable moments — but I forgot to write any of them down
On a Tuesday in March of 2013, hidden in the back room of the Washington, D.C. elementary school library where I worked, I felt myself giving up. On my choice of career and on myself. I was unhappy in the way people in their mid-twenties often are. I felt certain that my two degrees meant I was an adult, but also that I was waiting for an actual adult to tell me what to do. It was my second year working in a school, and I was still anxious at the beginning and end of every day.
That March, my first-grade students were working on a unit about maps and my library was home to 20 globes for them to use as reference. They were situated like orbs on top of the bookshelves I had been painstakingly stocking and reorganizing for a year and a half. The world seemed smaller and manageable when I looked at the globes.
For first graders, though, globes are confusing.
Why can’t I go from D.C. to California if it is only the length of my palm? one asked, pressing his small hand across the continent, middle fingers dipping into the Pacific, almost touching Hawaii. We talked, again, about map scale and I could feel their disappointment with the answer.
