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My father would be 115 years old today if he'd had the right luck and some longevity genes. On a recent train ride up to Westchester. I shared the double bank of seats, as it happened, with the noted English writer, Simon Winchester. We chatted about all sorts of travel related things. If you haven't read his wonderful, "The Map That Changed the World", I would strongly recommend it. In any case, he was talking about his travels and I was talking about my family's travels. I mentioned my grandfather (that was my father's father) who upped and circumnavigated the globe in the 1930's, but my father was also reasonably well traveled for his era. But because I heard my father's stories again and again as I was growing up, I knew a great deal more about what he did while he traveled. Mr. Winchester and I had only just gotten to some of the juicier parts of my father's story when I had to detrain for my stop. I'm hoping we might bump into each other again some day as his own travel stories were quite sensational--the "pants room" at the tiny and remote pub in Scotland sounded quite amusing.
My parents moved to Egypt almost directly after World War II in 1945. My father was offered a job to set up companies in the Middle East and so in late 1945, he and my mother moved to Cairo. It was a bold move as my sister was contracting pneumonia frequently and my brother had (still has) asthma and some severe allergies. Part of the deal my father set up for himself was that his employer would back him to play poker with Egyptian nabobs including King Farouk. Apparently, Farouk and the various emirs that played were quite good, but they had a weakness which happened to be alcohol and their abilities diminished the more they drank. In the end, my father won thirty-five thousand Egyptian pounds which needed to be converted to US dollars. Furthermore, my father's deal was that he could keep his winnings so he had to figure out how to change the money without getting hammered by official exchange rates in Egypt. He figured out how to do that and it entailed flights around Africa--Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Salisbury, Capetown and then back to New York.
I have yet to see Egypt, a place that I very much want to visit. Part of the reason is to visit Alexandria and to get a glimpse of Aboukir Bay where the English fleet under Nelson, defeated the French. Napoleon's army of artists, scientists, naturalists, etc. created a book one Egypt, "Description de l'Egypte" which had a significant influence on the French and British decorative art, expanding the decorative vocabulary of the 19th century across Europe. My parents did not bring back much from Egypt--a small stone lion and a stylized crocodile carved in ivory and a fly whisk made of ebony and ivory with zebra tail hairs. I didn't really appreciate these items when I was young and I have no idea where they are now, but I can see them clearly in my mind's eye. The iconography of Egypt, however, has always felt to me like a melange between some of the truly scary looking sculpture coming out of Mesopotamia (remember Sinbad's rocs) and the cultural canon that evolved in the Greek isles. That would make sense time-line wise, but every culture likes to have its ogres and wild beasts and European cathedrals host plenty of lascivious and evil looking devils for the wayward Christian. (The Christian afterlife is pretty dicey if you are a sinner.) I can only hope that my father, if there is an afterlife, has enjoyed a few poker hands with those nabobs--and won again.
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