MosesWrites

Up Up and Away

In third grade I developed a passion for coins. My grandfather had a small jumble from various European countries, back when Francs and Deutschmarks and Lire still existed, plus a number of older US coins, tin pennies from WWII, some Indian Head pennies, a few Liberty Head dimes.

I found wonder in that difference, an early revelation that things hadn’t always been the same, that even something as basic as money looked different, had different value and symbolism in different times and places. I loved learning about coins’ history, the aesthetics, and the reasons why, say, FDR displaced that Liberty Head on the dime, why Presidents came to appear on US coins in the first place (Lincoln on the penny in 1909).

My grandfather, my childhood best friend and the most influential figure in my life, indulged my early wonder. He would take me to hole-in-the-wall coin shops all over Rhode Island, he would help me look through thousands of pennies we bought at the bank, trying to find something unique, and then help me to roll them back up so we could exchange them for more.

That spring, in the late 1980s, my grandfather, my mother’s father—Buster, as he was known to close friends, Albert Wilson Matley, born in 1914—or simply grandpa, as I would call him, agreed to take me to Philadelphia to see the US Mint over a long weekend. You can imagine how ecstatic I felt, overflowing with anticipation and joy.

Then one afternoon, my grandfather picked me up at school, as he always did, probably a week before we had planned to travel. He looked forlorn. Chris, he said, you know how I’ve now got this medical issue—he had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer, luckily quite early, and with an excellent prognosis, but still the first time I had had to grapple seriously with the mortality of someone who I loved more than anything—and the weather in Philadelphia looks terrible. So I don’t think we can go.

Heartbreak.

But my grandfather, being my grandfather and always with a trick up his sleeve, continued, before I could even start to cry—

So, I think we should go to Bermuda instead! The weather will be much better.

What?!? I had heard of this island because my parents had gone there on a belated honeymoon; I might have seen a picture or two. But I had never left the country.

Yes, he said, I went to the travel agent this morning, and I booked flights for you and me and grandma.

My mother, as you can understand, was beside herself. I didn’t have a passport. My older brother and sister, of course, seethed with envy, but they had had no interest in Philadelphia, or in traveling with my grandparents, and they had some sports things planned in any case. I had no summer clothes that fit properly. Yet we had a week, and anything can happen in a week!

Having grown up during the Great Depression, my grandfather had always been exceptionally conservative with money, so he too had found his own reckoning with mortality. You can’t take it with you, he said, always one to meet challenges with levity, so why not enjoy it while we can!

He booked us a junior suite at The Hamilton Princess Hotel. I had no idea such things existed. I can still see so clearly its beautiful pink façade, and I remember the kindness with which the staff greeted this odd trio.

One day we took a tour of the island, a wonderful man with a van showed us everything he thought a person ought to see. Where the rich people lived, where he lived, where the local people worshipped, the best spot for groceries, the most scenic beach, he just went on and on and I soaked up every word and image. We went to the aquarium, and I saw colorful fish unlike anything I had encountered in my New England childhood. We learned about the history of the island, the legacies of slavery and empire. We saw people sharply dressed in Bermuda shorts and navy blazers, Black and white alike. Every difference invited inquiry, and every inquiry led to a revelation about how and why we live our lives in the ways we do, how differently lives are lived.

Thus began my fervent love for travel. The world, I realized, offers itself to us in such splendor that not to see it, not to explore it and to learn from its diversity, would be the greatest tragedy imaginable. Soon I would understand as well, not every journey entails romantic wonder and the seamless service of five start hotels. Travel, too, presents frustrations and obstacles and unexpected annoyances that so often undercut the stylized snapshots of social media, yet which let us grow and gain resilience and self-reliance and clarity about what we truly need, whether practical or profound. (To this day, whether visiting friends for a weekend, traveling overland in East Africa, or rafting in the Idaho wilderness, I will always have Q-tips to swab my ears after bathing: I don’t know why, but it’s a simple pleasure without which I’m genuinely less comfortable.)

Yes, we can travel in books and movies, in music and museums, but nothing can replace fully sensory immersion in something new if, ideally, literate learning compliments and intermingles with our exploration of place, as I can recall so clearly the power of reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five while visiting Dresden, or the enchantment of Marquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera while visiting Cartegena.

Yet my grandfather wasn’t one for historical landmarks and high culture. I remember hearing the story of how he decided to stay on the bus and take a nap at many of the greatest sights in Europe, having begrudgingly agreed to take my grandmother to visit. But with an eager, energetic grandson in tow, he was up for anything. His own childhood had been robbed by hardship; now he had his chance for fun. Like a child with a gold credit card, as I described him to the minister, Tom Aulburn of blessed memory, another truly great man, of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, who offered his eulogy when my grandfather passed, as he had done for my father—though that’s yet another story.

Travel: after Bermuda, my grandpa and I kept going. I worked and saved, cutting grass, washing cars, painting the neighbor’s fence, raking leaves in the fall, any and every odd job I could find to make a few dollars. He agreed to match anything I earned, with his stolid Yankee work ethic as the basis for all things. Before and after, he taught me about budgets, interest, certificates of deposit, the FDIC, how to balance a checkbook, clipping coupons, analyzing unit prices—mind your pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves; yet never penny wise, pound foolish.

Likewise, he taught me about tools, and how to fix and maintain things.  He taught me how to change the oil in a car, how to change an electrical outlet, how to sharpen the blade on a lawnmower. He showed me what quality meant in one’s work, not necessarily refinement or exceptional craft, but sturdy reliability. He always had his eye out for a new project, whether repainting a room or refinishing a piece of furniture. Along the way, I learned how to pick the right tool for the right job, how to improvise, and how to prepare for and to mitigate a mess—so that finished work left things nicer than I had found them.

Amidst all that practical discovery came our first cruise, which actually came about despite, rather than because of, my grandfather.

My grandmother, who herself also suffered greatly as a child, having had nearly a third of her lungs removed due to tuberculosis, and who endured my grandfather’s obsessive thrift, had always wanted to go on a cruise. They had married in 1940, when she was just eighteen or nineteen, on New Year’s Day, only a short while before the US would enter World War II and my grandfather would be sent to fight in the Pacific, spending two years on the USS West Virginia.

Unfailingly polite, and tremendously patient, my grandmother also had a persistent streak and knew how to get things done. She had the highest principles and best manners. Gladys Elizabeth Hughes Matley came from a better background but fell in love with a kind man from the wrong side of town, with a mop of red hair and a willingness to do anything for those he cared about.

My grandma never learned to drive, but she worked as a fashion buyer at a time when very few women had professional roles. She traveled to New York to bring the latest trends back to Providence. She also quit on the spot when she found out her male counterpart, with less experience, earned more than she did. She walked across the street and took a job with a competing department store. She dressed Miss Rhode Island and loved to wear pearls. She read trashy tabloids, watched soap operas, and said the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed. Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

So as their fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, my grandmother, in cahoots with my mother, decided she would take a cruise; it would be a present from my parents.

My grandfather didn’t like the idea: I spent years on a battleship and I’m never spending another night on a boat for the rest of my life.

You’re going to go, Buster, and you’re going to like it, my mother replied. It’s not like the Navy, don’t be a fool.

Of course I would go along, that would be part of the deal.

A few months later, off we went, on a flight to San Juan to board a Norwegian Cruise Liner and to see the Eastern Caribbean. Turns out, my grandfather loved it, so of course it had been his idea all along. He started planning the next one before we even finished the week. No powdered eggs and sixteen-inch guns, no enemy fire and bodies buried at sea. Instead, all-you-can eat buffets, swimming pools, musicals, and bingo.

I shot trap off the stern, and dozens of people cheered as clay pigeons shattered—thanks to my great uncle, my grandmother’s brother and an avid sportsman, along with our retired NYPD detective neighbor in Maine, I had gotten to be a decent shot at a young age. I sipped virgin pina coladas and my grandfather got the whole pool deck singing, at the bar, at the bar, where I smoked my first cigar, and the money in my pocket rolled away, rolled away.

It's a miracle we didn’t get kicked off the ship.

I learned to snorkel, even though I have a life-long aversion to putting my face under water. I saw old sugar cane plantations and heard reggae for the first time. I ate fruit fresher than I ever thought fruit could be. I watched with intrigue how the ship maneuvered and docked. I learned about the mashup of meaning sprung from centuries of servitude that had ensnared a cacophony of African cultures under frequently changing colonial sovereignties. At ten or eleven years old, I only had a passing sense of the magnitude of what I had encountered, but it planted many a seed for future study, not least the great opportunity to learn with Philip D Morgan, a leading expert on slavery in North America and the Caribbean, while in graduate school.

We took more cruises, and we visited more islands. We would go to the travel agent and search together for the best deals. I loved the glossy brochures, the deck plans, the logistics and details. I loved looking at maps and learning unfamiliar place names and wondering what life might be like in Curacao or Cozumel and why those little dots had been given such odd-sounding names that I didn’t know how to pronounce. I loved checking flight schedules and comparing routings and airlines, and learning about different types of airplanes and what had become the so-called hub-and-spoke system of domestic US air travel.

Amidst those searches for good prices, my grandfather and I also plotted as to how I could miss some school if a great opportunity popped up. Susan, he told my mother, he’ll learn a hell of a lot more traveling than sitting in a classroom! Most often we got away with it.

Over endless cribbage games, we would talk about trips past and future. We would imagine grand adventures and create new silly stories.

Unsurprisingly, after all that Pacific sunshine during the war, in his mid-70s my grandfather needed to have some pre-cancerous skin lesions removed, and he got a stern lecture from his dermatologist. Like me, he burned easily, either Casper-the-Ghost white, or Larry-the-Lobster red.

Once, preparing for a trip, we visited a CVS drug store to pick up supplies. Standing in line, I said, we should get some more sunblock. My grandfather said the doctor had given him some free samples to use. I replied, those won’t last long. Not missing a beat, he countered, I said the same thing to the doctor, and the doctor said to me, you’re not going to last long either!

The woman in front of us, unaware of my grandfather’s humor, turned around and said loudly and indignantly, NO HE DID NOT. My grandpa and I spent the whole car ride home laughing.

Probably, too, I was steering the car from the passenger seat, because that’s the sort of thing my grandfather would let me do.

Indeed, around that time, he taught me how to drive, even though I could barely touch the pedals. One day, spur of the moment, he bought a five speed, stick shift silver Ford Escort hatchback: the price was right. My grandmother hated not having four doors, but as with so much, she came to terms with my grandfather’s impulsivity.

Two cars before that, we had rusted out the undercarriage because one of our favorite pastimes involved, after it had rained, going to the big parking lots of nearby, mostly abandoned textile mills, and driving through the puddles to splash as much water as we could. Amazing fun, less amazing for the longevity of an automobile.

For my driving lessons, we would go out early in the morning, when no one was around, in particular to a spot called Chase Farm, which had a good, long, decently well-maintained dirt road through a field, and a few small hills so I could practice with a manual transmission on an incline. First gear, second gear… could we make it to fourth or fifth? A bit of well-managed risk.

Chase Farm had a lovely little pond, too, with an abundance of sunfish, and a few catfish, which didn’t take much to catch. Along with cribbage, we spent a lot of time fishing, also in Lincoln Woods, sometimes in my Great Uncle’s small boat, and more often while in Maine for the summer, jigging for mackerel on the Southport Island swing bridge. Dwight and Dwayne, twin brothers, and their sister Ruthie, manned the bridge 24-7 and had inherited their roles from their father. Salt of the earth people and as kind as their down east accents were thick, when the fish weren’t running, we would play cribbage, too, though they occasionally had to run off to latch the gates to stop traffic and then to rotate the center span to allow boats to pass. Though if an ambulance was on the island, the bridge stayed closed: the only way on or off. Boats would back up in Townsend Gut with no choice but to wait, just as if a Coast Guard Cutter had to pass, the bridge would stay open as long as needed, cars backed up and bending around the corner. My older brother often spent time with them, too, helping with various tasks, and one of the highlights of my childhood was riding on the sidewalk of the center span while the bridge swung open. Unfortunately, that’s not possible anymore, given safety standards and liability concerns, but wow, I still smile thinking about it. Just on the Southport side of the bridge, Robinson’s Wharf and its tugboats and dockside dining loomed large in my imagination, and from that spot, in later years, I would go out lobstering with the same retired NYPD Detective who would bring me shooting. Yet another story.

Maine, Boothbay Harbor, held our other travels in the balance, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to spend such a large part of my childhood. In 1985, my father, an attorney, had a particularly successful string of cases, as the story goes, and after years of renting for a few weeks or a month each summer, my family bought a second home, perched atop a cliff overlooking West Harbor Pond, a mile-long stretch of water which, fed by a freshwater creek and natural springs, had been dammed for cutting ice in the nineteenth century. Wonderfully, that meant, before global warming began to accelerate more rapidly, most every winter we could skate under the moonlight, a bonfire along the shore, and enjoy the enchantment of making the first marks on fresh ice.

The house had been built by a man named Alan Clark, who also owned and operated a sawmill and pre-Home Depot building supply company. He had employed out-of-work boat makers to do all the cabinetry. Drawers with latches, sliding drawers on an angle, drawers that could store anything and everything, every single space had a drawer. Two cubes, one for bedrooms and a bathroom—with a urinal!— and the other for the living, dining, and kitchen areas. The two cubes were connected by an aptly named middle room, which had wonderfully large windows that overlooked the lake. Both cubes had lofts, one entirely enclosed and the other covering only the dining table and kitchen, with what must have been at least a twenty-five-foot ceiling topped by a skylight. I spent countless hours in that loft playing with Legos. Many winters we found a towering Christmas tree that you needed a ladder to decorate, often cut from the adjoining McCobb farm, and dragged home on cross-country skis.

But the best part of that property was that it came with a guest house, really part of a barn that had been sort of turned into a house, but which we had the ability to fix up, and which meant that my grandma and grandpa could have their own place to stay for the entire summer. More projects, more chores, more yardwork. We had all the more chances to stretch our travel imagination together.

On another cruise, this time to the Western Caribbean, we visited Dunns River Falls in Jamaica, a place I had always wanted to see after having glimpsed pictures of it in one of those glossy cruise line brochures. My grandpa and I took a smaller boat over and back to the Falls, an outing beyond the scope of my grandmother’s endurance, and along the way we got to talking with two younger Japanese women. At one point they asked, had my grandpa ever visited Japan? During the war, he said. I was there for the surrender. It also happened to be, of all days, the 7th of December (I was skipping school): the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

Those two young women, perfect embodiments of Japanese culture, as I would later learn, became reverent in their words and posture. They apologized. They asked for forgiveness for their country’s shame. I could hardly fathom the moment. They looked in their bags for something, anything, they could offer as a gift, and they found a couple of stamps and insisted that my grandfather take them, as a token of good will. It’s the closest I ever saw him come to crying, and he thanked them, and said he had hope for the future and held no hard feelings. Yet before that, I do remember my grandpa insisting he would never buy a Japanese car. Then a year or so later, he traded in that two-door, five-speed Ford Escort for a Subaru Legacy station wagon. He said he wanted a car with all-wheel drive, but I think that that encounter in Jamaica had made its mark. Even a seventy-something year old man, one who would, in his final months, due to a tumor on his brain, have hallucinatory delusions about the smell of death, the smell of bodies burning in the water, that his own body smelled like death, even that man could take a step toward forgiveness.

After my grandmother passed, we traveled less, though after my dad died, my grandfather insisted we take at least one more cruise together as a family, this time with my mother and sister. He was slowing down a bit, and I was getting older, starting high school, and busy with more and more things. We had a good time, but it just wasn’t the same: as with Little Jackie Paper and Puff the Magic Dragon, painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys.

My grandfather had moved in with us, so I still got to be with him regularly; he would do the laundry and cook dinner and try to do as much as he could to help my mom, to help his daughter. But after many years of successful treatment, his cancer returned, this time with a vengeance, and he knew it would be his end. Still in shock from my father’s sudden death a year and a half before, I shut myself away from the pain. I wish I could have done more for him, but I believe he understood. He would never have wanted to be a burden.

Eventually, as the disease progressed, one evening—smelling those smells from the war and becoming convinced that the house was on fire—he called 911. Since my brother volunteered at the local station, once the address was confirmed, it was only a matter of seconds before sirens blared and just minutes before the first truck arrived. Not seeing any signs of fire, though, they just rang the doorbell and spoke with my mother and got everything sorted out. After that, we took the phone out of my grandfather’s room, and we transferred him to a residential hospice. Within weeks he had passed.

I’ve carried so much of the best of my grandfather with me throughout my life: his insistence on practical skills, the abundance of aphoristic wisdom he shared—measure thrice, and you’ll never cut twice—his sense of clarity about right and wrong, and above all, his spirit of play and adventure.

From high school trips to Italy and France, my first time crossing the Atlantic and my first time riding in a 747, my first time encountering the history and culture of Europe that had only ever been the stuff of textbooks, I’ve always sought the opportunity to explore. I’ve learned what I love—wandering the streets of a new city at dawn, trying new food at out-of-the-way restaurants or indulging in multi-course Michelin-starred meals—and what I don’t—group travel, crowded places, overly-orchestrated itineraries.

Throughout college and graduate school, I had a stack of Lonely Planet guidebooks from which journeys would emerge. I traveled on a shoestring, with a large backpack, and stayed at hostels, always trying to find the quietest ones where I could go to bed early, unbothered by the partygoers and late-night revelers. I collected frequent flyer miles and went to off-the-beaten path (and cheaper) places, whether in Central America or Eastern Europe, often with just a paper map and a good sense of direction and a rough idea of how I might get from point A to point B. I stayed with any friend who would have me, wherever they might be in the world.

I learned to take it slow, to people watch, to search within myself for an understanding of difference. I remember in particular one moment in January of 2007, having flown to Barcelona to visit a friend from Princeton, just before I would embark on serious preparations for my qualifying examinations. I had taken the train south to Valencia, and I sat on a bench eating an amazingly fresh orange while reading Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Man. I remember wondering, against the backdrop of the second George W Bush administration and the unrelenting War on Terror and escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what it meant to be an American, and, when push came to shove, what informed my most basic understanding of ethics. I remember discovering, clearly and powerfully and in a life-changing way, the difference between being lonely, and being alone. I had always struggled with the former, especially as an introvert, and realized that in order to strive to be my best self, I also needed abundant, enriching, rejuvenating time alone with my self, with my memories, with my ambitions.

As with ice cream—and I do love sampling ice cream anywhere in the world—travel too unlocks and inspires stories. With each step, with each new experience, I find something I want to share, and I meditate on how best to turn those thoughts and feelings into words.

I started writing this essay while flying back from Lanzhou to Shanghai, after four wonderful days discovering a place new to me. In my own chance encounters, in my conversation with a curious little girl on a mountain path, in my gratitude expressed to the owners of noodle shops, in the happiness of the elderly men and women gathered together to sing in the botanical garden, curiously eying a random foreigner, I know I’m still sharing something with my grandfather, and I can only hope that in my teaching, in my time with young people, they too will know the wonder of Buster’s laughter, his smile, his irreverence and love, and that they’ll discover themselves and the world in their own adventures. His memory truly is a blessing.

6-31 July 2025

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