The Frugal Traveler

A few years ago I read a comic that depicted three little kids talking about their summer vacation plans. “I’m going to Florida this summer! Where are you going?”, asked one child. ” Oh you know. My family and I are going to the Grand Canyon,” told another. When the children asked the third party where they were headed to for the next three months, she as-a-matter-of-factly, told them ” I’m going to Ancient Greece, England, and Mayan Mexico.” The next frame of the cartoon showed her reading a stack of books underneath a tree.

It is now July and I have yet to go anywhere particularly extravagant for my summer break. This is in part due to the fact that I’m busy working for my mother at the Moberly Mirror, but also because I’m taking two summer classes at MACC. The classes I’m taking, to easily knock down my credit hours towards graduation, are College Algebra, and History and Development of the Short Story. This means that when I’m not pumping my neurons to figure out what zeros are in the equation for f(x), I’m reading stories written by writers from all around the globe. If you know me well, you know that I am not a fan of math. I do, however, love to read. Reading not only helps you recognize words and sharpens your comprehension skills, but it also lets your imagination run wild. With reading you can be a queen gliding along the Nile River. You can be an American hero fighting for freedom for your country. You can even be a member of an indigenous tribe in Uganda or wherever you want.

The places I have ” been” and the people I have transformed into this summer, so far, are not anything like what one would find in Moberly, Missouri. I have traveled to 14^th century England to follow the lives of the travelers on the pilgrimage to the Shrine of Thomas Becket. To those of you who do not know, this is Canterbury Tales. I have witnessed the horrors of curiosity and spousal abuse in the fairy-tale, Black Beard. Not only have I traveled the world this summer with my reading, but I have also learned a few very important life lessons. Nathaniel Hawthorne suffered a very long bout of depression, as many many many writers have, and used his feelings to write his stories. He is most famous for “The Scarlet Letter”. My class is focused on SHORT stories, so we read two of Hawthorne’s most famous short stories: Young Goodman Brown, and The Birthmark. In Young Goodman Brown, I learned not to take long walks in the park with the Devil just to escape my monotonous life, and to appreciate every part of my existence just the way it is. It’s very true: you never know how much you have until it’s gone.

I took a literature class at our community college last semester and was tickled pink when we were assigned to read Zora Neale Hurston. She was a southern writer that wrote about things she saw going on in her town of Eatonville, Florida. She also wrote about social issues going on in the south. Her sense of humor and sometimes sarcastic way of looking at things usually turned bad situations into good ones.

With my class, I have not only ventured to physical places, but also mental. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a woman is institutionalized in a ratty house for post partum depression. The house is seemingly normal: but of course not to her. The room where she is forced to spend most of her time has the most awful wallpaper, and the most hideous shade of yellow. The swirls and odd pattern of the wallpaper makes the woman go even more insane than she already is. She eventually starts to see movement in the wallpaper and at the very end of the story is convinced that a woman is moving, living, and taunting her amidst the wallpaper. The way Gilman wrote the story, you can’t help but get lost in the woman’s mind. Her pain and terror is tangible: you can feel it!

Most of the other stories I have read don’t necessarily stand out so far to end up in a local newspaper, but I think you all can understand how fascinating it is to get yourself lost in a story. You don’t have to be enrolled in a college course to be able to read about things. You can always check out your local library! As Emily Dickinson wrote:

” There is not frigate like a book

to take us lands away,

nor any coursers like a page

of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

without oppress of toll;

how frugal is the chariot

that bears a human soul!”