My traveling companion, Pierre

When I first found out I was going to sea, there was a lot of bantering about whom I might pack in my suitcase.  While the MV Explorer has strict rules about stowaways, they are actually quite liberal about who can go along for the ride.  If you are married, you can bring your spouse.  If you have a registered domestic partner, you can bring that person for just a little more than a legally married spouse.  If you just have a pal, it costs a little more than a domestic partner.  So you know exactly the cost of taking the political stance that you won't marry until everyone can marry the one person they want to marry.  A pal costs more, but no one is looking into what kind of relationship you have, so long as you're willing to share a cabin.  

I have three grown children.  Two are married, with children of their own, and traveling is not an option for them.  The third could not fit the trip into her own busy travel schedule--no way to get the necessary shots and visas while she was temporarily in Colombia on leave from her life in Germany.

Enter Pierre.  Pierre is the efzone my grandmother gave me when I was little.  Why I named him Pierre, I do not remember.  Maybe it's his jaunty red beret.  Or perhaps I was simply too young to make any distinctions finer than American/Exotic. 

An efzone is the Greek palace guard with the blue vest, white pleated skirt, and pom poms.  They are practically the national symbol of Greece.  Mine is pretty beat up, with one leg separated from its socket and a shoe that doesn't stay on.  He's filthy with age and love, but I think he might disintegrate if I washed him.  My grandmother gave me a new and improved model when I was in high school (I named that one John, even though by then I knew better), but Pierre's my guy.

He's done a fair bit of traveling already.  When I left home for college, my younger sister absorbed him into her collection of dolls and other cast offs, and we had a good natured battle about who should have custody--me as the owner who abandoned childish things or her as the family archivist.  One Christmas he arrived at my house in a bubblegum pink doll case, the sort every girl but me had her Ginny dolls in.    Then my sister had serious health issues and I sent Pierre back with a card that said, "I would do anything for you."  In the wake of divorce, I opened a package to find Pierre, because she thought I could use a steady man around the place.  He traveled back and forth several times over the years, as we weathered various storms.  Pierre has been standing guard on my mantel for a few years now, and I thought perhaps he should come along for the ride.  He's earned it.

My grandmother left her home in a tiny Greek town in Asia to come to America.  As far as I can tell, she never liked it much here.  If you've read Nicholas Gage's Eleni, you can appreciate the difference between village life and New York City in the 1920s.  My aunt says her mother always thought they would make their fortune in America and return to raise their children as proper Greeks.  War and financial reversal got in the way and my grandparents never saw their homeland again.  My grandmother eventually rejoined her family for the last years of her life, but they had long ago been forced out of Turkey into Greece.

The voyage my grandmother took in 1921, from Istanbul to New York, bears little resemblance to the one I will take starting next week.   Still, as Pierre and I settle in, I will think of her, standing at the rail looking up at the same endless sky and sea.