Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 2

A Page Turns…

It all started with the ringing of my wall mounted phone.

In the summer of 2002, my little family and I moved into our first real home after more than a decade of rental apartments and make-do furniture and backpacks and other trappings of the expatriate’s life on the road. We were finally putting down stakes, or so we thought, convinced that the next assignment abroad would no longer come.

We’d had our fun. Now we had a kid. It was time to settle down.

So we bought a fixer-upper townhouse with rental income in the up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, where the Uber-mensch and I had been living off-and-on since the mid-1980s. And I set about designing the perfect kitchen:

• white cabinets -- not from IKEA -- with glass fronts and interiors painted to pick up the green flecks of the granite counter tops;

• a stainless steel sunken two-basin sink;

• a four-burner gas-powered Viking-wanna-be stove;

all trimmed with

• a back splash of handmade cracked sea foam-green glazed tiles.

Classic. Lovely.

My kitchen would be the heart and soul of our home. There, we would have dinner parties galore, and my daughter would enter adulthood with fond memories of winter evenings doing homework by the warm hearth, surrounded by the sensual smells of real home-cooking.

On that fateful late-December day in 2003, the dream kitchen of my dream home was nearly complete, just in time for a sumptuous holiday celebration, too. I was home from work with our building contractor. We were applying the finishing touches, mounting the decorative crown molding that had to be custom cut and fit to the specifications of the house's kooky, idiosyncratic shape. The contractor was banging on, yet again, about how “nothing is straight in this old place! None of the angles are true!” when I was saved from his brewing tantrum by the ringing of the proverbial bell: in this case, our old-fashioned land line.

I picked up the phone. It was the Uber-Mensch, he who shall be referred to henceforth by his real name: Jimmy.

“What would you say to Paris?” he said.

“I love Paris,” I answered.

“For two or three years?”

Silence.

Now, it must be said, I had always wanted to live in Paris. In fact, I had spent most of my college years wandering its streets vicariously as I studied French fin-de-siècle avant-garde literature, painting, music and film. I had lived in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, China and Hong Kong, all the time roughing it, all the time wishing I could have just a minute in a more modern and famously-cultured place as Paris.

But I had always wanted my very own home as well. And now I had one. And the new cabinets were white. And they were not from IKEA.

“Well,” I paused. I held my breath.

“As long as it’s only for two or three years,” I said, thinking the time would be short enough that I could still return to my job and career, yet long enough to learn another language (remember what I told you in Ch 1 - I’m a linguist by training and as such love nothing more that collecting languages). Long enough to give the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo), then eight, another language as well.

“Start packing then,” said Jimmy. “We’ll be leaving in six months.”

At least I’d have half a year with my white dream kitchen.

Have you ever moved your family abroad? How did you feel about it?

Leave your comments below!

 *  *  *

Like this post?

Delighted to send it direct to your inbox!

Image of the CandleStick Telephone Gal, 1910, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.