TO EXCHANGE: ONE SLIGHTLY USED LIFE IN BROOKLYN, NY. INCLUDES INSANE FAMILY, ESCAPEE SACRIFICIAL ROOSTER, DESTRUCTO PIG AND INCONTINENT CAT. WILL CONSIDER ALL SERIOUS OFFERS UNLESS YOU LIVE IN A WAR ZONE OR SOMEPLACE REALLY COLD.
That’s the ad I would have put in the paper if I’d thought of it, but I didn’t think of it. Even though I spent a lot of time dreaming of being in a different place or with a different family (somewhere more interesting than Seventh Avenue with people who don’t make normal seem like some unachievable goal), it never ever occurred to me to swap my life with someone else. I mean, you wouldn’t, would you? Who would want it? (If you don’t want it why should anyone else?) I never thought of going to Europe either. I knew Europe was out there, over the ocean, but I’d never thought about going there any more than I thought about visiting the North Pole (which is obviously not something I would consider for one minute). Not until Mr Magoo (otherwise known as Mr Apolony, our principal) announced that the school was sponsoring a trip that summer. I was pretty much in sleep mode by the time he said it, but as soon as he did, my mind woke up and my soul leapt with the joy of destiny seen. A summer in Europe! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I didn’t just want to be on the trip – I had to be on it. All of a sudden, I could practically hear the narrow, cobbled streets of The Old World calling plaintively. Come! Come! they cried. Cherokee Salamanca, we’ve been waiting hundreds of years for you! We can wait no more!
None of my friends was interested.
Angelina said she didn’t “get” Europe. Angelina said that as far as she was concerned Europe was just a bunch of old buildings. (To be fair to Angelina, you can’t really expect her to get totally warped out by the idea of Continental Travel. Her ancestors were murdered, lied to, enslaved and cheated by Europeans. Whereas my ancestors were mostly the ones doing the murdering, lying, enslaving and cheating.)
Bachman didn’t “get” Europe either. He couldn’t see why I wanted to traipse around a pile of old rubble.
Bachman’s my best friend, but let’s face it: he can be a real pain in the butt when he wants to be. And this time he really wanted to be a major annoyance.
I said Europe isn’t old rubble, it’s a treasury of great architecture and art.
Bachman made a face like he’d just swallowed a beetle. “You mean all the great architecture and art that wasn’t bombed into oblivion or stolen in some war, right?”
I said that was the stuff I meant.
Bachman said if he wanted to see old paintings he could go to a museum, which he wasn’t likely to do since he doesn’t like museums. (To tell you the truth, I’m not really a museum kind of person, either. They’re sort of like zoos for paintings. I always feel sorry for the pictures, stuck in a room with all these other paintings they don’t know and all these people trooping past them who are probably thinking about lunch or what they’re going to buy in the gift shop.)
“Europe isn’t exactly a museum, you know,” I informed him. “It’s a real place. People have lived there for millions of years.”
“People’ve lived in caves for millions of years, too,” said Bachman.
“Well, maybe you missed this, Robert, but most of our ancestors came from Europe.”
“Not mine,” said Angelina. “Mine came from Colombia.”
“Only some of them,” I said. “The rest all came from Spain. Which I’m pretty sure is part of Europe.”
“Well mine totally came from Europe,” said the ever-helpful Robert Bachman, Jr. “And the reason they came was because they were either starving or going to be killed if they stayed.” He smirked. “So why would I want to go there?”
Well, obviously he wouldn’t.
And I couldn’t go because my mother’s economically challenged. (She could be the poster child for the Working Poor.)
“Who’s going to look after Gallup and Tampa if you’re in Europe?” asked Jake. (And I could be the poster child for Slave Labour.) “And anyway we can’t afford it.”
Beginning, middle and end of story.
Or so I thought.
But then Jake came home from work on her birthday with the news that she’d made a deal to send me to Europe.
I said, “Who with? The devil?”
She said with Caroline Pitt-Turnbull. Caroline Pitt-Turnbull is her friend from when she went to art school in London. Caroline has a daughter my age, and this daughter was desperate to get out of London for the summer and she’d jumped at the chance to come to Brooklyn (she was obviously also clinically insane).
I said, “But England’s not in Europe.”
Jake said that it’s in the European Union, which she figured was pretty much the same thing. “And it’s a lot closer to the continent than Brooklyn is.”
This was true, but so is Greenland.
“Except London’s not Paris, Athens or Rome, is it?” I figured London was pretty much like New York, only they don’t have yellow cabs and the accents are different. “Maybe it has queens and princes and stuff like that, but that doesn’t exactly make it the ancient cradle of civilization or anything.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Cherokee.” Jake made one of her what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this? faces. “Do you want me to call Caroline back and tell her it’s off, and you can stay here and spend the summer keeping Gallup and Tampa from destroying the neighbourhood?”
Well, if she was going to put it like that. I mean, I wanted really old and stuffed with the ghosts of history and time but I wasn’t above compromise. Let’s face it, there wasn’t really much of a choice between sweating and eating pizza in Brooklyn and riding double-decker buses (possibly with guys who look like Orlando Bloom) and drinking tea from china cups in London. So although I was disappointed, it wasn’t exactly like being impaled on the horns of a dilemma (as my grandmother, who knows about a trillion hokey old sayings and never gets tired of repeating them, would say).
“No, that’s OK,” I said. “I’ll go to London.”
(Lesson for Today: Take what you can get, or you may not get anything.)