Thinking... skip this if you want to keep it light!

I am reading a book that I like. I read the NY Times review and it did not give it that good of a review, and it's 700 pages. But I realize, that I like the journey...I like being in a book, getting to know the characters, going through experiences with them. I do get disappointed if the end is not that great, but there is so much to be said for the journey.

This book has 4 main characters, all young men, living in New York City. Last night I was reading a description of one of the characters childhood. He grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. His father was a ranch hand who had emigrated from a Scandinavian country. His parents were especially cold and only interested in getting through their obligation of raising a son.

This character, moved to New York City to become an actor...and how he describes it is so close to how I feel about my life....

" but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough, This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people's words!- it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day. "


and if I stop to think, this is how I feel. I am living the only way I know...which is living to learn, living to know, to grow, to see. But why? Why did I go on this path?
I never even took a flight on an airplane till I was married and in my late 30's. I made my first trip to Europe ( alone and Tuscany of course!) after my dear friend John died in the 90's. What made me like this, so unlike where I came from.

Like the character in the book, I did not come from a family that encouraged adventure or travel or independence...I think my parents were like like the character's parents ...they took on a project by having a child and they had to see it through. It was their obligation, their job. Like my Mother going to church each Sunday, it was just something you just did. There was no real passion from my parents in my upbringing , unlike what I see in parents these days.
I was expected to live by the adage "little girls are to be seen and not heard."

I don't say these things to put them down. I think that they didn't know any better. They were following the rules of life that ( I am pretty sure) came from my mother's side, came from the Catholic church, came from the Depression. After all, my parents were a product of The Depression. My father was born in 1921. I am guessing my mother was born in 1923, 1924? My mother's father was ruined by The Great Depression...but luckily, or not, my mother's mother was one of those women that stepped over her broken husband to take charge.

Perhaps her blood runs in my veins. She ( amazingly) went to nursing school in 1914 in New York City from a tiny upstate town. For me ,to move to New York City with a scholarship for photography in 1983 ( 69 years later,) I had to fight my father tooth and nail.....What must she have had to go through. I will never know....