LEAP OF FAITH
THE EMAIL ARRIVES on a Wednesday afternoon. Subject line: Spin the Globe REVEAL! I hurry home to meet the school bus, and my twin 14-year-old sons and I gather in the kitchen. For four months we’ve been exhilarated by the idea of traveling somewhere—anywhere—in the world on 48 hours’ notice. The boys have insisted they want to go as far from Idaho as possible, and we’ve spent dozens of dinners dreaming up destinations. Tibet? Tasmania? Tonga?
“I just hope it’s not, like, Dallas,” Owen says as we open the laptop. “Or Twin Falls. Twin Falls would suck.”
“There are nice parts of Twin Falls,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, a little unsure now. “But it’s not Mongolia.”
My wife, who learned our destination at the outset so she could book the boys’ air travel, smiles. For four months she has given away nothing, even as we scrutinized her every gesture. Did her eyebrow twitch when we guessed Tokyo? Did a vein throb in her throat when we said Quito?
The only information I managed to extract from her came out weeks ago while we were brushing our teeth. She said, “It’ll be amazing.”
In daydreams I milked that adjective for all it was worth: We’d explore amazing Sicilian hill towns and eat amazing pasta alla; we’d book an amazing boat to surf the amazing Maldives, and Henry would say, “Dad, isn’t that Mark Wahlberg over there?”
