“Sara loves the Halliburton. I hope you didn’t get rid of it. That would be a shame,” was what my father said when I returned. This was the large travel book filled with black and white photos of a grinning, sunburned Richard Halliburton either atop a furry Yak in Tibet, or reining in an unruly camel dwarfed by an enormous sphinx in Egypt, or balancing on a water buffalo in China before mist-laden bluffs melting into infinite sky. It may have gotten mixed up with the rest of the books that had been loaded into cardboard boxes and donated to the library. Many of the books that filled the house had come from there originally, carefully chosen from the Book Sale on Fridays from eleven to two by my sister and father, and shown like prizes over tuna fish sandwiches, coffee, and pie.

     My mother had enjoyed looking at the Halliburton photos as a child in a book identical to ours and used to marvel at the adventures expressed in terse, hyperbolic prose in the captions underneath. She liked this book and the one by the Chinese philosopher Lin Yu-tang. About that one’s thoughts she always said, more rhetorically than not, as if she were summing up her own life: “He makes so much sense, doesn’t he? So down to earth, no shenanigans, nothing fancy.” The philosopher’s book sat on the top shelf of the bookcase in the bedroom appropriately under a wooden plaque depicting some wry sage leaning dangerously back in his chair, a frothy stein of beer in hand, saluting the reader with the caption: “too soon olt und too late schmart.” I see my parents laughing at this shared secret when I asked the meaning of this saying one morning standing by their bed.

     My mother never liked to travel; home was sufficient. Traveling was reserved for the restless Halliburtons on a quest for the strange and unfamiliar, who hope to find the different in the different but find the same.

     Happily when I discovered that the “Halliburton” had survived the donation, I gave it to her. She opened the large book with the water-damaged pages then and there in front of her on the kitchen table and leafed through it during the lunch she could not eat because she had lost her sense of taste and so her appetite. She lingered unhurriedly over each photo, one by one, and read the captions. The photos were the same as she remembered them from her childhood, no different; that in itself was traveling and staying solidly at home. After that I don’t think she had the opportunity to look at the book again though she had put it under the lamp on the table beside her bed. At least that is where I saw it when they came to get her.

©Vincent Montenegro

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