Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now
The Travel Writer
If someone had asked me, that day as I put my things into the dresser drawers John had
emptied for me, what the years ahead held for us, I would have answered without hesitation,
"Travel writing!" Though my expose of racism at Northwestern had been turned down everywhere
I sent it, we'd already sold a tongue-in-cheek description of Swiss customs inspection to the
Louisville Courier Journal. We could look forward, we believed, to a lifetime of exploring
new places.
How very accurate this forecast was to prove, I didn't know -- nor how utterly unlike what I
expected. Travel John and I have certainly had, but the real journey has been the interior
one. The truly new places we've visited have not been in South America or Africa or Asia, but
along the road to heaven.
The Welcome
I had a foretaste of what our reception in that ultimate destination may be when John and I
returned to the States in the fall of 1948.
I'd written my parents that John had grown a beard. It was very full and very red, and it
seemed only fair, at a time when beards were a rarity in America, to prepare them. Daddy
wrote back that we weren't to worry; he'd arranged for the Coast Guard to take John off the
Mauretania out at sea and bring him ashore after dark. I was used to Daddy's brand of humor;
John was not. Two hours .before we docked he disappeared into the men's shower room. He
emerged clean shaven, the upper half of his face deeply tanned from weeks spent biking
through Italy that summer, his jaw and chin a sickbed white.
My parents, sister, and brother, waiting on the pier, took this two-toned apparition to their
hearts anyway. And when the cat climbed into his lap that evening, his approval was official.
It was my welcome into his family, though, that I remember best. John's sister, Mary, had
written me several times in Geneva. Now another warm note from her was waiting to greet me in
Louisville -- Mary and her husband, a lieutenant commander in the navy, lived in Norfolk,
Virginia. John's parents held a reception for us there in Louisville, where some of the
guests, I thought, looked a
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