how it feels to be free

It’s Emancipation Day in Canada. I woke up to notifications on social media letting me know that CBC Books had included A PLACE INSIDE OF ME in their list to celebrate the holiday. Emancipation Day was hardly ever mentioned when I was growing up in Toronto; we were told that slavery was something that had only happened in the US and instead the focus was on the big Caribbean parade downtown that was organized by recent immigrants. A cousin in Nevis recently sent me a video of performers dancing onstage—lots of feathers, flesh, and glitter. My memories are from the 1970s, before the parade got too big and became a ticketed event instead of a chaotic string of flatbread trucks clogging the city’s main artery. My father took us once, lifted us up onto a truck carrying throbbing, massive speakers, and then joined the crowd of revelers and disappeared…joy and panic. That combination of feelings is part of most memories I have of my father and it seems we spent more time together in the summer. Both my parents were teachers so they were busy with work during the school year. In the summertime, we hitched the camper to the station wagon and took I-95 down to Florida. Or we went to my uncle’s cottage on Mink Lake…or, after the divorce, we flew down to Clearwater Beach with our mother and stayed in a crummy motel for up to a month. I’m heading to Glasgow in a couple of weeks and since my trip to San Juan have been thinking about what it means to take a vacation, what it means to be free. This time around I’m hoping to squeeze in some research; the Viking exhibit I missed in Edinburgh will be in Aberdeen until October. If the train workers aren’t on strike, I should be able to spend a day up there. Last weekend I checked one thing off my summer To Do list—I visited the National Park Service visitor center at Pullman. There are a couple more museums I want to visit here in Chicago and I plan to tour the African American museum in Richmond when I go there this week. I want to swim in Lake Michigan and go hiking, kayaking, maybe buy a bike. I finished Book #5 yesterday and turned it in; I’ll probably still have to do edits for Book #4 this month but I cleared my calendar last week so I have more flexibility to travel this fall. My mother is still in the hospital so I might need to return to Toronto despite my visits in June and July. I have a book festival up there in late September but right now that feels like a long ways away. An author friend’s mother just died and he reached out this morning to let me know how much she respected me. I think I only met her once at the Brooklyn Museum book fair. She was so proud of her son and spent hours at his table as he stopped passerby to talk up his books. I don’t think any of my kid lit friends have ever met my mother. She and I aren’t close but she congratulated me yesterday when I told her I’d met my deadline. When my father was dying, his care fell to me because I was the only child of his that lived in the US. Now the tables are turned. I’m the one who flies in for a couple of days and then gets to go back to my regular life without the daily burden of managing a sick parent’s care. There’s a new British pub in my neighborhood; a friend and I tried it out last week and took a photo to share with a mutual friend in Japan. I look fairly carefree, I think. Not so stressed about my deadline that I stayed home to write. Not so worried about my mother that I couldn’t enjoy an excellent, expensive meal. I sometimes feel guilty about my wide open days and the privilege of having the means to leave one comfortable place to visit another. I worked for these days, planned and schemed to have them. But something is still owed. Will have to work on striking the right balance, I guess. Service to others isn’t the opposite of freedom but sometimes it feels that way…