For all my love of coziness, homey simplicities, the friend on the phone, the cat crying at the door, good coffee and my own bed, travel lures me like a preacher to the promised land.

The hills are blue and hot. There is a brown, dusty field in the bottom of the valley. I hear a machine, a bird, a clock. The clouds are high and enormous. Through them the inevitable jet plane passes: this time probably full of passengers from Miami to Chicago. What passengers? This I have no need to decide. They are out of my world, up there, busy sitting in their small, isolated, arbitrary lounge that does not even seem to be moving — the lounge that somehow unaccountably picked them up off the earth in Florida to suspend them for a while with timeless cocktails and then let them down in lllinois. The suspension of modern life in contemplation that gets you somewhere!

When we are not busy earning a living or cleaning the house or being spiritual, we sometimes go to the movies. It passes the time, usually entertains us, occasionally illuminates us. But if God asked us on Judgement Day what we did with the hours he gave us, very few of us would say, “Well, God, I went to the movies.” That just would not seem very central. Similarly, we wouldn’t likely boast of the number of hours we had spent listening to the stereo. Or reading novels. Or watching the television set. Yet if He piled all those hours together on one side of a balance and on the other side he placed all the hours we had spent in deep meditation, most of us would feel that our best tack might be an appeal to God’s mercy rather than to His Justice.

As far as I know, my grandmother’s only regret in life was that she died on a Thursday. “Damnation!” she cursed fate in front of her sister Gert, her four children, and her thirteen grandchildren. It was Aunt Gert’s idea that we all be there, huddled around my grandmother’s bed to remind that lady of what her seventy-two years had accomplished and thus ease her pain in passing. It was important that we be there, Aunt Gert had said, because “my sister loves her children so.” “Damnation!” my grandmother repeated. “Bridge luncheon is tomorrow.”