Sense of Adventure
My friend Robert was a genius—one of the few I can honestly give that label to. We worked together on a publication and we’d go to a Parisian-ish café in east midtown Manhattan for lunch where we’d share wine and brie and baguettes, escargot or whatever happened to be the specialty on the menu. We’d pretend we were lunching on the Champs-Élysées.
And we’d have typical wine-infused smart-person conversations: meandering, sometimes combative and always meta-philosophical. One day he mentioned a book he’d co-authored on the five senses and I told him I wanted to read it. He dropped a copy on my desk the next day. I had never owned a book written by someone I knew so I insisted he sign it and write something memorable.
I see him removing thick glasses and leaning down with his face nearly touching the page, laboring to scribble the words–as he was legally blind from a childhood illness. His long black hair fell forward over his face as he wrote. A staff meeting started just then so I stuffed the book into my tote bag and didn’t remember it until I got off the subway that evening.
When I took it out, Robert’s book on the five senses, and opened it to the first blank page, it read: “To Judith, whose sense of adventure is the best sense of all.”
The dictionary defines adventure as: “an exciting or unusual experience with the possibility of risk or uncertain outcome.” It originates from two Latin words: “ad”–to arrive and “venire”–to come to what will happen—implications of a future unknown. And the future is always unknown. That’s of course why it attracts me: endless possibility.
I believe my thirst for this quest to seek the unknown was passed down genetically. My mother was a dedicated adventure woman—though she’d have balked at the description. Yet, what else to call it? She went to camp as a grown-up at Summit Lake near Bear Mountain, escaping work and the summer sizzle of Manhattan for a two-week respite. She learned to ride and became an accomplished horse-woman. She swam in the icy lake and shivered with the other grown-up girls; she sat around a campfire and sang songs mimeographed in a makeshift songbook which she kept, filling my sister’s and my pre-bedtime hours by teaching them to us in her clear, laughing voice.
“The sun is a shining to welcome the day, heigh-ho, come to the fair…”
“Kookaburra sits in the gumdrop tree….eating all the gumdrops he can see…”
I realize my mother never passed up a chance to go for long drives or on trips with my father and later with us. Going for hikes, exploring the urban wonders of Saratoga Springs, where my father worked at the racetrack and convinced her to spend the month of August by calling it “a vacation,” she kept us entertained and occupied.
He worked six days at the race track, and she kept five-year-old twin girls in an unceasing state of wonder among the city parks, mineral springs, and the enchantment of being completely removed from our Queens apartment to a semi-rural setting in the foothills of the Adirondacks–where you could hear crickets—crickets!—during the daytime and see fireflies like tiny pinpricks of light in the sultry darkness of a summer night. It captivated my imagination and fueled a hunger in me and still feels entirely enchanted all these decades later, like I might have dreamed it—even though I know I did not.
So this appetite for the unknown, for adventure, may be in my genes or in soaking up like a sponge how it enlivened her, this irresistible lure of escape, her absolute insatiable hunger for the wonder.
But it wasn’t anything I ever talked about with her. I should have seen it in the way her usually dark mood brightened as we sent out on our summer adventures. How she pored over the lines of maps and navigated like a co-pilot sitting next to my father. How she announced each and every street, highway, and landmark sign, reading them out loud as if for the first time no matter how familiar they were from past excursions.
I was too young to draw conclusions about it at the time, and anyway I felt an outcast, wanting always to escape as well–retreating into daydreams instead, but wandering off every chance I got and wandering inwardly when I felt closed in, escape thwarted.
What finally led me to understand this desire and disposition we shared was being cooped up during the pandemic lockdowns. My mother once told me she was claustrophobic and didn’t like elevators. I now know that to be a state of mind we share instead of an actual physical ailment. And I am feeling it more and more with each passing week.
Like so many Americans I have grown restless with each proclamation of caution and each mandate of worry and concern. And I admit I have found myself behaving in what could only be called “quirky ways”–not taking care of routine things and endlessly putting off tasks that should be impossibly easy, but somehow aren’t.
I wondered if I was really “losing it” until a few random conversations with my sister suddenly gave me a flash of recognition about certain ways my mother did things, little admissions about her behavior I’d never noticed. And suddenly, I could see her–in my own frustrations reflected back. That desire to go, to escape, to get away, have adventures and find the wonder, find something that meant something other than what was expected of a housewife in the 1960’s.
And that, of course, is me.
Setting out on this quest, now, is an extremely late start…but it’s never too late once you realize that it isn’t actually insanity, except that maybe in some form, it really is.
If so, it’s in my DNA. And knowing that, I may now find a way to honor it for myself and for her, and finally live up to the inscription my genius friend wrote in the book he gave me, so many decades ago.