Romanian Story

It was still communist Romania then.
We shared our small Bucharest apartment
with cousins, aunts and complete unknowns.
Life as usual.

And I was seven years old.

One Sunday morning, my father opened a World Atlas and showed me the places he has traveled to. Here was Spain and the Guns of Gibraltar, Morocco and Libya, Patagonia with her wild winds, Egypt where Napoleon found the Rosetta Stone and the key to the language of the pyramids, Cyprus given as a wedding present to Cleopatra, and Homer’s world from Turkey to Ulysses’ Ithaca…..

I was mesmerized.
I touched the geography contours on the map,
dreaming of far lands and hidden seas.
And, every day, I asked for more stories
the “Meridians of the Heart”
as he called them.

I was so proud of my father’s traveling adventures,
that I could not stop telling all my friends about them.
One day, my mother who happened to overhear our conversation,
turned around and said in a flat,casual tone:

“ You father never left the country.
The Communists did not trust him with a passport.”