 The Painted Ladies "In the waves of change, we find our true direction." ~author Unknown In the midst of some pretty surreal events taking place in my life right now, I've spent a good portion of the first five days of 2015 thinking about what it means to "Go in the Direction of Your Dreams", and how to do so fearlessly while not wreaking havoc on my everyday life. If the new year was a book, each page a day, January's title would be "Shock & Awe". How does one even go about finding a path to a dream with a big ol' hurricane of crazy going on? Well, for me I go back to doing one thing I'm good at...research. With my heart pounding loudly in my ears, on 2 January I booked a trip I've been wanting to take for many years and today I've been diligently researching specific points of interested connected to childhood memories of my last trip to the destination I'm heading for soon. My mind said, "You should do something practical with this money", but my heart reminded me that there's no such thing as waiting for the "right time" when it comes to dreams. The "right time" is the first moment your step onto that road is possible. Following my dream of becoming a writer drove home that fact, as I built a door from thin air to open up the road for me. In 1980, when I was eleven, my mother was transferred with RJR-Nabisco (the Del Monte division) to San Fransisco, California. I took a trip with my grandmother to visit her in the summer of 1981. Mama lived in a little studio apartment on Nob Hill, took public transportation to work (I remember thinking it was funny that she kept tennis shoes under her desk to put on for her trek home), and sometimes moonlighted as a singer with the San Fransisco Bay Street Band at a little club near Fisherman's Wharf. One afternoon, my grandmother and I made the trip to her downtown office building on Market Street and Mama took us to lunch. She ordered me the first cheesecake I'd ever eaten, an otherworldly experience I will never forget! Much like the places here at home where my memories of Mama are everywhere, San Fransisco has always had the same power of drawing her strongly to mind. I have not stepped foot in the City by the Bay since I was a child, and the last time I was there, my mother was vibrantly alive. From a child's eyes, San Fransisco was a curious, strange place (my first glimpse of it was from a Greyhound bus and it looked like fog was going to swallow the entire city whole). I was terrified to see the sign warning of "Shark Infested Waters" out past Pier 39 when we went shopping and adamantly refused to get on a Ferry to Alcatraz for fear it would sink into the bay and I'd be eaten by said sharks! I wondered what weird people would build a windy, curvy street (Lombard St.) and why. I also loved jumping onto the moving cable cars, feeling powerful and important, as we took them from place to place. We also froze our butts off during our visit. Who knew it could be freezing cold in California in July? I wonder how I will feel about the city when I see it through grown eyes. I'm about to find out. Which direction am I pointing my little compass? Up first...due West!  myluscioustravel.com
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About The Author
I grew up in rural North Carolina. When I was only nineteen, I moved away and became a military wife. My only aspiration at that tender time in my life was to create an adult life that "fixed" all of the "injustices" of my childhood. Secretly, however, I wanted to reach for the sky! I wanted to be a writer and find ways to "save the world" (my mother used to say, "You have Save the World Syndrome".). Mostly, I wanted to matter. Archives
August 2021
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