Five Truths and Two Lies
Two of These Seven Travel Stories Never Happened
It’s May 2020, and I’m home, like you. I love my home almost as I love to travel, so my home is not what you might call “neat.” My four bedroom colonial’s brown roof covers enough unloved stuff to make Marie Kondo sob in her soft white handkerchief.
Neither is my computer “neat.” But it has started talking.
My MacBook Pro is whispering that the dusty souvenirs on my shelves from Africa, Japan, China and Viet Nam need more than a Swiffer duster to avoid feeling a teensy bit stale. It’s saying stories magically transport us to exotic corners of the world, through sentences like this, “The women’s hands were rough like cracked sandpaper when we shook them, probably because they build the bomas themselves by hand, out of dung and mud and sticks.”
My laptop is asking me to share of the stories it reads from its own hard drive when I’m asleep and its day of work is done; stories I’ve written.
“OK,” I said to my computer. (Desperate to talk with anyone in my home who is alive beside my husband and Alexa. Wait, you mean Alexa is not alive either?)
Which stories are we talking about?
These:
- How to Buy the Adulation of Thousands
- The Bucket in the Stream
- Going Buggy in Japan
- Even Nice People Get in Trouble
- The Secrets Within the Cu Chi Tunnels
- Our Visit to a Maasai Community in Longido, Tanzania
- A Walk on the Beach Like No Other
The great thing about Marie Kondo-ing stories is that you can keep the stuff you love and share it too at the same time. And if they are travel stories, we can be at home and traveling simultaneously. It’s like what Jerry Seinfeld says about cars: “You’re inside! You’re outside! You’re still! You’re moving!”
Two of these stories really didn’t happen, I made them up. Which do you think they were?
One of these stories appears in my new memoir, From the Period. To the Colon: Memoir of a Child Writer.
