Errands.
Appointments.
Other people’s plans.
Nothing on that calendar belonged to me.
I was sixty-nine years old.
And suddenly I realized I had spent most of my life waiting for “someday.”
Someday Robert and I would visit Italy.
Someday we would see Japan.
Someday we would travel through Australia.
Someday I would sit in a café in Paris and order something I couldn’t pronounce.
Robert and I had talked about traveling after retirement.
Then he got sick.
Our someday ended before it ever began.
So I made a decision.
I sold my house.
Then I booked a trip around the world.
My children reacted as though I had committed some terrible betrayal.
“You’re being selfish, Mom,” Karen said.
“What about the grandchildren?” Melissa asked.
David stared at me.
“You’re really going to waste all that money traveling?”
Then Eric said the thing that surprised me most.
“That house was supposed to stay in the family.”
I looked at him.
“It was my house.”
He didn’t like that answer.
When I refused to cancel my plans, Karen and David stopped speaking to me for a while.
That hurt.
But I went anyway.
I told myself that while I could still walk through airports, carry my suitcase, climb stairs, and explore without asking anyone’s permission, I was going to see as much of the world as possible.
Australia was my fourth stop.
That was where I met Arthur.
He was seventy-one, widowed, gentle, and possessed the kind of dry humor that took a second before it made you laugh.
We met in a secondhand bookstore in Melbourne.
We both reached for the same detective novel.
He looked at my hand resting over his.
“I suppose at our age, fighting over it would be undignified.”
“At our age?”
He smiled.
“Fair point. You look thirty-five.”
“Now I know you’re dishonest.”
He laughed.
We had coffee that afternoon.
Then again two days later.
Soon we were taking long walks, browsing bookstores, listening to jazz, and arguing about whether roses were overrated.
“They’re needy,” Arthur told me.
“They’re flowers.”
“Exactly. Imagine being that demanding and not even paying rent.”
I laughed more around Arthur than I had in years.
He had been married to his wife, Anne, for thirty-eight years before she died.
So neither of us pretended grief had disappeared simply because time had passed.
