In October, there was the Euro trip. It was two weeks of comfort after a wild ten months here in the Dobson house. I had surgery for a ripped-up rotator cuff at the end of January. Then, I spent four months at home. It was the first time in our 25-year history that we spent most of the day, every day with each other. Worries about my future with work and in life haunted me. During all these challenges, I was somehow saved from myself. Europe shined as something like a dream after all that.
Leave a CommentAuthor: Patrick Dobson
Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.
The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.
Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.
He looks forward to hearing from you soon.
The day after the night in Trier, Virginia and I packed up our things and rolled them across the street to the bus stop. Stefan and Magrit had bid us farewell before we were off to bed, so their good feelings and wishes went with us. We only had to wait a few minutes. The rain came down in a pitter. The tiny Ruwer River flowed brashly under the bridge. Except for the sounds of aerial and terrestrial water, all in Eitelsbach was quiet.
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Leaving friends always makes me think that this will be the last time I’ll see them. Whether with coffee cups drained with a pal on an afternoon or when visiting friends far away, I get the sense that time is getting short. I may never see them again, whether they live far or near. There’s a sweet melancholy in the thought. We have lived. We are now at ages that do not guarantee another morning. But we have had each other and have been luckier than we know at that.
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When we went to Musee l’Orangerie, I stood in front of the full series of Water Lillies and cried. Maybe it was a lifetime of waiting for this moment or the painting, all 100 meters of it in two oval rooms, overwhelmed my senses and emotions. I suspect it was both.
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The arrival at Charles de Gaulle was smoother than I expected—not merely the actual landing of the plane, but the overall getting-into-Paris experience. It helped that I was happy to be approaching home, a place where I feel much better and more comfortable than I think I ever have in my native country.
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