In Favor of Stories
I leave for Lisbon tonight. It’ll be my first international trip in well over a year. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m ready.
I don’t know how to answer them. Am I ready logistically? I suppose—I have a new suitcase and a renewed passport and two weeks of accommodation booked. Emotionally? Also yes. I’m sad to leave New York, but in the same way you’re sad to have to put away a book you love in order to make it to a dinner party that will fill you up in a different way. It feels right to go, and it feels like it’ll feel right to come back.
In between the going and the coming back, though, is what I’m most excited for, and what I’m most ready for: the chance to learn new stories.
And I don’t mean travel adventure stories, like getting bedbugs in Chile or escaping tyrannical farmers in New Zealand. (Though those are welcome, because I do love writing about them.)
I mean origin stories.
Place stories.
The stories we tell ourselves about how the world works, and what’s the best way to exist in it.
About what love means, and what government should do for its people, and what role women should play in society, and what art is meaningful, and what food is to us. About what’s just, and what’s beautiful, and what values are worth building a life around.
Going somewhere far from home gives me the gift of double origin stories.
I understand my own better—and I learn somewhere else’s.
Navel-gazing in solitary confinement
I didn’t understand what Midwestern food culture was until I left the Midwest after college for the east coast.
For example: not having paczki on Fat Tuesday made me wonder why I had eaten it growing up, which made me research Catholicism, and Polish immigration, and the industrialization of greater Detroit. That research—and experience—helped me see that the role that the church plays in the social lives of suburbs and small cities. (I later wrote about that, too, for…The Midwesterner.)
New York to Michigan is far enough to get a bit of perspective. But I need to peer at home from farther away in order to really deepen the way I understand it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get beyond what’s comfortable and see myself, and the society that created me, from a distance.
Being an American traveling and living abroad has taught me more about what America is than anything I’ve done, learned, or seen from within the United States’ borders.
I’ve been to dozens of museums in Latin America where the destabilization impacts of American intervention are made clear: here’s what happens when we intervene in an election, when we turn the other eye to dictatorships made possible by said intervention, when we sell arms to violent governments, when we buy food from countries who fly their exports over mass graves filled with disappeared citizens in order to get it to us.
That’s a heavy one, but there are less heavy ones, too.
I’ve sat at dozens of dinners in Spain that drag on for hours, where the pintxos pepper long retellings of familiar stories and where the digestifs come out, cloudy liquor in fingerprinted glasses, to fuel the next round of tales. I’ve sat there and seen lives shaped by family, friends, and bodily pleasures in ways fundamentally different than the one I led and the ones I witnessed in the States.
And that then makes me ask: what does mealtime mean to me? Why is food in America so often seen as a necessary input and not an end in and of itself? What does food access—and access to fresh, local ingredients, specifically—look like in the States, with its Monsanto-saturated production systems and its picture-perfect produce, and how does that compare to a European table? When is having everything a fast track to having not much at all?
“The tomatoes suck in London“
We’ve established that traveling, domestically and internationally, makes you understand home better. You come back more appreciative of all you’ve missed—and let it be known that as critical as I can be of my home country and its healthcare system and its structural racism, I am entirely and thoroughly grateful for its guarantee of my personal freedoms and its free water, among other things—as well as more aware of what you’re missing.
The second gift is the story you understand about a place that’s not your own.
I think about my friend Anna, who is Italian but spent a large part of her formative years in the UK. She once told me her version of the first gift: finding beautiful hydroponic tomatoes in London, only to cut them open to find mealy flesh and a watery web of seeds, which made her realize how special it was to have access to such fresh, rich, tomato-y tomatoes in Italy. “The tomatoes suck in London,” she moaned.
She’s given me a sneak peek of the second gift, too: a new framework to understand public health.
The other day, we were talking about the Italian government’s campaign to get more people vaccinated. They had enough shots to give everyone at least one dose by the end of August, explained Anna, but they were facing a hurdle they were unlikely to get around: the Italian summer vacation.
Vaccine stations would stay empty, she said, because everyone was going to the beach. They’d be gone, gone for the entire month, gone to eat pizza and drink grappa and lay out on towels and lounge chairs grounded in pebbly sand and slice their bodies through cerulean waves before laying out in the 30°C sunshine again. No one wanted to delay their vacation in order to get a shot, especially if it meant they might feel ill for a few days afterward. And no one wanted to drive back to their local vaccine center for the second dose three weeks later.
What a beautiful point, no? That the Italian concept of vacation, and particularly summer vacation, is so entrenched that not even the potential to get a free life-saving vaccine could disrupt it.
(The public health challenge is not beautiful, to be clear. But the up-close view at a psyche that’s completely alien to my own: how cool. I, hailing from the land of “I’m out to give birth to my first child but if you really need me, I’ll Zoom in from the hospital” out-of-office messages, cannot relate. But now I better understand Italians!)
Anna’s story only half-counts because I heard it in WhatsApp audio messages over several days, versus saw it live from the Amalfi coast.
Making friends, watching movies (and TikToks), and even reading books: they are all ways to travel without traveling. Ways of swimming in stories without being there to pin them to page.
But I’m a writer, remember? I want to see it myself.
Vegetating elsewhere
I was on a walk with my cousin Laura a few weeks ago, pacing up and down the hilly side roads of northern Michigan, talking about the universality of stories.
We were discussing the labels we put on people—Catholic vs. heathen, Democrat vs. Republican—and how it’s too easy to not look past them. Too easy to hold space for someone’s unique story because you think you have them figured out from the jump.
Being back Up North was an exercise in not ignoring things. I hadn’t been there in a long time, and everything looked different. The pier was smaller. The art made more sense. I had to stop and ask myself: What do I think I know about these people, and this place, simply because I’d been told those things were true? What do I know now that I have my own lived experience here to soak in and study and make meaning from?
There is only so much we can learn about the society that raised us while we’re a part of it. The distance is a necessary part of the growth. And the empathy. And the grace.
Lest you think I thought I came up with that idea, let me tell you that I did, and then I did a quick search and saw that Mark Twain said it better: “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
I’m very ready to go to a new little corner of the earth. To till it for stories, and views, and feelings.
And to bring them back to you, lustrous and hearty and not at all wanting.