You should know that Nanny is a seasoned traveler, it’s an important fact about her. She infected some of the grandkids with the travel bug by  taking them anywhere in the world they wanted to go when they turned 15. My brother went to Ireland, my sister to Barbados, one cousin to the Galapagos Islands, another to England. Me, I was supposed to go to Italy…but I decided to stay home with my boyfriend. And she was right, I’ve regretted it ever since. (You know those videos dedicated “to my 16-year-old self?” Mine would say, “Are you insane? Get on the damn plane!”)

Anyhow. Nanny traveled quite a bit up until two years ago. She wanted to take The Girls to Barbados (she was born and raised there, and we still have family there). She had an extensive list of places on the island she wanted to share with them, and we were making steady progress through this list, right up until the moment she stepped off a curb unassisted and fell. She bloodied her knee and broke her hand and her glasses, but the real damage was inside. After the fall, she wouldn’t travel anymore. She felt she was too old, too frail, her eyesight too bad. (It is worth mentioning that a lesser woman would have broken her hip and been bedridden for weeks, but not Nanny. Several of us compared notes after the fall and concurred — she bounced.)

Now, Nanny is a popular lady with lots of family who love her and want her to visit. But she  refused to go anywhere that was more than 30 minutes away. I dutifully spread the word that Nanny was not traveling anymore, which in some cases was met with incredulity, because Nanny has always traveled. But after a year or so, she began to very slowly, a bit at a time, regain her courage. And what better way to celebrate regaining your courage than with a trip to New York?

When she first brought up the subject of going to New York with my sister and her fiance to see the places she had lived in as a child, we did a lot of negotiating. She wanted to take the train, which would have cost about a thousand dollars and left her wandering alone between her sleeping car and the dining car. I wanted her to fly. She refused to go anywhere near the Atlanta Airport. I refused to take her to the train station. Finally, after much back and forth, she agreed to fly if I would get her a wheelchair and personally take her to the gate.

The big day finally came, just last Thursday. She was waiting outside with her red hat on and her little train case packed and ready (the train case is like Mary Poppin’s carpet bag, it apparently has no bottom.) We squabbled over whether she needed to bring a jacket (I won that round by bringing the red cape she got in Ecuador, she couldn’t refuse that). The airport went smoothly. Delta had a wheelchair there in about a minute and a gate pass for me, we sailed through security using the handicapped gate, and TSA was kind and polite, even reprimanding me for taking her shoes off (“She only looks 25 so we’ll need to see some ID, but if she’s over 75 we don’t make her take her shoes off!”) I got her some Dramamine and a snack for the plane, and we finished lunch just as they started boarding.

It happened as we were waiting for an attendant to wheel her down the walkway to the plane. She gripped the armrests of the wheelchair and suddenly looked scared. She was worried about leaving her cats, and afraid of flying.

“Nanny, the cats will be fine, I promise! I’m going to let them in and out all day long, just like you do. Anyway, they have nine lives. And I’m putting the blue bubble of safety around your plane, nothing’s going to happen.” (Any time anyone I love is flying, I put the blue bubble of safety around the plane. Works like a charm.)

She brightened up when the attendant arrived, so I gave her a kiss and told her to be good and not to talk to strangers — she secretly gets a kick out of that. I can still see her, being wheeled backwards down the walkway, with her red hat and her red fuzzy cape spread across her knees, blowing me a kiss. Just as she rounded the corner, her voice floated back to me:

“Maybe I’ll go dancing every night!”