Nov. 21 I want to do

 

The Nov. 21 Flash Fiction of the day prompt was "I want to be" which I changed to "I want to do" and put it the third person. Four-year-old Janey is me in spirit. I did see the world and do recognize different cities on the TV without being told what they are. Some have been work related. Some research related and some just to do it. Some I've lived in, some I've visited once but others I know almost as well as I once knew my home stomping grounds of Boston.

Four-year-old Janey lay on her tummy on the living-room carpet with her daddy’s map in front of her. She couldn’t read, didn’t understand the blue, yellow and green lines but she knew it was the secret to finding some place different.

 

Different from her garden with the rose bushes and swing, her kindergarten, Zitzow’s corner store where if she was good, her mummy would buy her a vanilla ice cream cone. Different from the pharmacy and shoe store downtown. Different from her tiny, tiny world.

 

Her grandmother read her stories about princesses in lands far, far, away.

 

Her Uncle Ray had pointed to her daddy’s globe where they lived in Massachusetts and where he had fought something called a war in Germany.

 

She wanted to see the blue sea of the globe and the different countries that her uncle had talked about that were different colors on the globe.

 

Fast forward decades and Janey looked back to those days of dreaming about traveling as she pulled her suitcase out of Heathrow Arrivals, her XXth trip to the U.K.

 

Her world had grown through the tiny black and white television of with the squiggly screen of her early childhood, to a larger TV and then a color screen. National Geographics revealed cities, mountains, deserts, people who looked different and brown-skinned women who didn’t wear anything on their breasts. Books had filled in information about different places. The internet came and there was nothing she couldn’t discover.

 

Most of her discoveries were done as part of her job as a photographer for a major news station.

 

Now when a scene from Damascus, Edinburgh, Vienna, Paris, London, Stuttgart, Berlin, Stockholm, Cairo flashed on the screen of her TV in whatever hotel she was bunked in, she recognized it without the voice over describing it.

 

She could read the colored lines on a map, but she didn’t have to. She had GPS on her phone.