Yesterday, early morning, but not too early, Aviv came into the kitchen just as I was jackhammering a story. I’d been up for two hours working on a tale I had started the day before. It was what I think of as a constipated product; taking a very long time, with little to show thus far.

“I’ve got a question,” he offered. Oh, oh, I thought. He’s going to ask if I’m interested in going up with him in his single-engine airplane. Or maybe today is the weekday he takes a dip in the frigid Marblehead water. Aviv is Rebecca’s son-in-law, and we are visiting for his daughter Sivan’s Bat Mitzvah.

“Are you and Rebecca interested in going to Rotary with me today?”

“Did you know Rebecca and I joined Rotary a year ago?” I replied.

“Really? Then you know there’s usually a speaker after lunch. Would you guys like to talk to our group?”

“That’s a relief. I thought you were going to ask me to go flying or swimming. Instead, all you want is for us to speak to a group of strangers. Do you have a topic in mind?”

“You travel a lot. Maybe talk about that.”

And that is what we did. Which reminded me of Popeye. More on why in a minute.

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Deanna Bugalski 💋 asks whether we are optimists or pessimists. I think people who create something every day, including writers like you and me, must lean toward the former, hopefulness. Routinely, we bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. That proves, to me, tomorrow can be different from today.

Dissimilar could be worse. However, I believe the movement toward a better world that, at times, seems glacial or, sorry to repeat, constipated, is inexorable. If I knew nothing about the who, what, when, or where I would be born again, I would choose now.

The early 21st century is better in a thousand ways than any other time period. Part of the reason is travel, where people from nation A meet people from nation B. It becomes harder to hate and to fear those whom you have met.

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So yesterday morning, Rebecca and I brainstormed about our travel talk. Among our many destinations was the tiny island of Malta in the Mediterranean, where we spent the spring of 2018 with a group of Luther students and where the 1980 film Popeye was made. Here they are outside the Vatican.

What a phenomenal group of young people, who made this four-month travel experience for Rebecca and me a peak experience. From our Malta base, we took our students to Morocco, Croatia, and Italy.

Our Rotary 20-minute travelogue, something that hadn’t existed when Aviv came into the kitchen nook, was a hit with our audience of 30, who asked lots of questions and awarded us honorary members of the Marblehead Rotary.

Our tiny drop into the ocean of human interconnections.

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