Traveling Companions

During our two-week tour of Egypt, we visited some the world’s most stupendous and well-preserved antiquities, but I will probably remember little of them in detail.  Just a week or so after seeing the statue of Horus that I posted, I don’t remember if I saw it  at Luxor, Karnak, Edfu, Abu Simbel, or in the Egyptian Museum.  But I won’t forget watching the sunrise over the Sahara during our three-hour bus ride from Aswan to Abu Simbel, nor will I forget the other participants in our group.  They are at least as vivid to me as the antiquities we saw.

I’ve already mentioned Delores, who climbed from rural South American poverty to an important administrative position in a California school system, and Donna, who thought she had lost her daughter’s dog.  Donna had never worked outside the home, where she raised three children, all of them successful in their fields.  She exhibits a rare lightness of being, an attractive quality that endeared her to my wife and me. 

We liked all the participants though.  Paul, for example, was a retired psychiatric social worker who had worked for a large health care organization.  The only one of us to have suffered an intestinal upset on our journey, he confined himself to his room for a couple of days, but when he emerged he was as cheerful as ever.  He was traveling with Patricia, who retired as the head law librarian at a major university and had headed  her state’s Women’s League of Voters.  This was at least the sixth Road Scholar tour on which they’d traveled together, but their attachment, so far as I could tell from their interactions with one another and, more importantly, from their separate rooms, was platonic. 

Roberta, a motherly woman who spoke in a pleasingly deliberate fashion and who had trained and worked as a nurse, eventually retired as the chief executive of a health care organization’s west coast division.  I never did find out about the work experience of Lily, a small, energetic, and sunny woman, the grandmother of two, but she told us that she participates in about six Road Scholar tours a year.  Home, evidently, is where she keeps her souvenirs.

Max, a retired chemical engineer, seemed at first glance to be a straight up white-bread sort of guy, but I found later that after finishing college, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Bangladesh, and that after his service there, he and a Peace Corps buddy motorcycled from Calcutta to the southern tip of India, from which they took a ferry to Sri Lanka, before crossing back to India.  They motorcycled up its west coast and then through Pakistan, the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan and Iran, ending their six month odyssey in Europe.  They slept out in the open and when it rained they got wet.  He recalls being chased by predatory dogs in Afghanistan, where the sandy terrain did not permit him and his friend to travel as fast as they would have liked.  But it was fast enough.  The dogs eventually quit, either because the young men had passed out of their territory or because of fatigue. You would think that I would have learned by now that you can’t judge a book by its cover. 

Max was traveling with Angela, his wife of eight years, a tall, attractive woman who, after living a very long time in one place, moved, due to an unspecified catastrophe, to another part of the country, where she reinvented herself, changed her career, and met Max.  He had been divorced a long time and, judging from the rapport that they exhibited with one another, his second marriage is a happy one.

Eugenia, a lively woman with a comic bent, retired as an office manager for an aerospace company.  After every trip abroad, she would have to submit to a debriefing, in order to maintain her security clearance.  She would be asked where she had gone, whom she had seen, and what she had done.  She could never, she said,  have gone to Cuba, her next destination, while she was working.

Rose, the only one of our group who was still employed and the youngest member as well, is a middle-aged lawyer whose arthritis makes it difficult for her to get about.  A wise-cracking woman with a mordant sense of humor, she managed with the aid of a cane to walk through all our sites until she fell at the Egyptian Museum.  After that, she used a wheel chair pushed by men that Road Scholar hired for her at each destination.  She was a good sport and didn’t complain, in spite of the pain she was suffering (which she admitted only when asked). She too had to miss a few of the sites.

How strange it is that memories of my traveling companions should be as least as powerful as those of the antiquities we had come to see, but such is the case.  By the end of the tour we had formed a cohesive, tightly knit group, and I was sorry to say goodbye to each and every member of it.


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