but paris is mine

My father is a captain, as is my brother. With uniforms covered in epaulettes and stripes and with caps on their heads – everything. Sometimes my father would be gone for up to seven months. That’s when blue envelops would land on our doorstep (made out of very thin paper, because it was cheaper) and we would make ‘collect calls.’ When I was a little girl I always knew I had to reply with ‘Yes, I do’ when I had a lady on the other end of the line asking: ‘Are you willing to accept the charges?’

My brother ended up getting educated at a maritime academy too. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Having an older brother walking around in a uniform, always surrounded by handsome guys for me to look at. We received cards from Honduras, I was allowed to join my dad on a trip to the south of China, he made trips to Jakarta and sometimes their ships would pass each other by somewhere off the coast of Kaap Horn in the Netherlands.

As you might understand, my degree of experience in travel was no where close to being as interesting as theirs. I would tell them about a trip to Vietnam I had planned, they would tell me they’d been there about six times combined. Every time I thought I would be the first to head to a certain destination, they would pull out another anecdote. “Honey, weren’t we there back in 1968 when we had all that fragile cargo?”

That is why I am so deeply and intensely grateful that Paris isn’t located by a coast. No harbor, so no reason for them to end up there. My dad has been a couple times when he was in the mood for a romantic getaway and at the age of 47, my brother is still a Paris-virgin. So they might have sailed around the globe at least a hundred times, Paris is mine.