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| my yearbook photo at 15 years old. |
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| 15 years old (that a Twiggy haircut by the way), with my high school boyfriend. |
(I showed you some of my writing practice here and here and here. I completed Judy Reeves' Wild Women writing class. Here is another of my writings that came from the class.)
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My Summer of Maps
by Jane LaFazio
I always knew I would travel and see the world. When I began reading, in earnest, in high school, I read Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As a teenager, I traveled from my home in California to Montana for a summer to work at Yellowstone National Park and papered my dorm room with maps. I memorized the map of the United States and tried to name each state along with its location. M.A.G.- Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. What was the state between Nevada and Colorado? Yes, it was Utah. I wanted to travel and take road trips and see and experience as much as I possibly could.
At the end of that summer in Yellowstone, I drove cross county with my newly met friends and was excited to check off my list each state we visited. When our journey ended, I took a bus to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was going to get a job and live near my Yellowstone roommate, Becky, a student at University of Pittsburgh. Except, on the bus, I met a charming, very tall guy named “Paris.” He and I spent a day and night in Chicago and made impromptu plans to travel to Boston and live together. I changed my mind around Cleveland and my trunk of clothes went on to Boston with him and without me. So, I was in Pittsburgh looking for a job, with only the clothes on my back, renting an attic room, with the bathroom downstairs and down the hall. After 2 weeks living that way, my uncle paid for my flight to New York City, to visit him and see the city for the first time….And then, I was back home, living at my mom’s by the end of September.
I bought more maps, for my bedroom at home, and started dreaming of my next adventure.
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| Me at age 19 or so |
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I still love to travel, though a bit more upscale now, and I still love maps for the adventure they represent. How about you? Are you a traveler too?
