The Far East and feeling guilty

Four weeks away from home is a long time. It's even a long time when your family comes and stays with you for ten of those twenty-eight days.

Now, I want to be very clear - I'm not complaining. Traveling is fun, doubly so when someone else is paying for you to do it. Traveling to places you'd never really planned to go to and finding them surprising and enchanting and wonderful and terrifying and challenging is what

the whole "be a traveler, not a tourist" meme is all about.

That was China. I spent less than a day in Shanghai, ten days in and around Beijing, and everything else was in places that many travelers - no, tourists - would never see. Hard, bustling, non-nonsense, sensory-overload places like Shekou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Dongguan; ordered, mostly-organised, planned cities like Chengdu; ancient, twisted Chongqing; gorgeous Suzhou (often called the Venice of the East on account of all the canals and arched bridges. And it was surprising, and revealing, and made me a little more aware of my place in the world.

Then Japan. Wow. Japan. What a place. And again, surprising. For me, the highlight of Japan was visiting Hiroshima, with its "stuff you, we're back" attitude and palpable optimism underpinned by a grim determination to ensure that their past is never visited on anyone else.

At some time I'll put together a more thought-out recollection of all of this, but for now, I want to reflect on something else: how does a family man reconcile traveling for work? And I don't really mean the kind of traveling I've just done, but the bread-and-butter fortnight in Brisbane/Melbourne/Adelaide/Albury/Dubbo/Collinsville kind of work.

It's easy to justify on one level. I have to provide for my family, my royalties aren't adequate, and there simply isn't enough work in my home town. And to not work in schools would be to go back to a job that I hated, and thereby make my family miserable.

Similarly, I can remind myself that the best writers are those who see more of the world than their own study. Of course. It's a no-brainer.

And yet coming home to feel like you're a stranger in your own home can be weird, and source of friction. Billy Connolly says that when he's been on tour, his wife sometimes has to remind him not to get into the back seat of the car. I sort of know what that's like. While I'm feeling sorry for myself as I slowly digest an RSL roast in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, my wife is helping with homework, making dinner, putting on the washing, making lunches...

Recently I had lunch with the wife of a writer friend, and I was saying how fortunate I feel, living the writer dream that I've always had. She began to cry, and asked me how lucky my family felt about my realised dreams. She talked about her husband going away for weeks, and coming home, and getting back into work, and meanwhile she' was left feeling somewhat forgotten.

So I want to say, to my family and to the significant others in the lives of my friends who travel for work, that with the exception of trips to places like China and Japan, it's not glamorous traveling for work. But we also know that it's even less glamorous for you, as you prop up your end while we ring for new towels.

(For Facebook Notes readers: this post is redirected from my 'head vs desk' blog at headvsdesk.blogspot.com)

Vale Ron Roy

Last Thursday my grandfather died. Ronald Maitland Roy was 94 years of age. He was born the same week that the Ford Motor Company introduced the production line. He was born in the same year as the zipper was invented, the Panama Canal was completed, construction began on Canberra, and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris. He lived with his parents, his two brothers and his two sisters in a dirt-floor house, sleeping on sacks filled with straw.

Ron dedicated his entire working life to the Sanitarium Health Food Company, working at the Weet-Bix factory in Cooranbong, then going on the road as traveling salesman (I think they call them sales reps now), and finally working in health food shops in Tasmania and Victoria.

He was pretty much deaf for most of his life, so he wasn't considered a good fit for soldiering. His deafness kept him in a bit of a cocoon much of the time, and he would often be heard sitting quietly in a chair, whistling to himself in his warbly fashion, or sometimes playing the harmonica.

The things Grandpa loved most in life were (in no particular order) his wife Rene, his son Don and daughter Dianne, his vege garden, fruit-n-nut chocolate, his grandkids, and his four great-grandkids. Even when he was very frail and nearing the end of his life, his face would light up when the kids walked into his room. I feel very grateful that my girls, who are 15 and 12, got to know their great-grandfather, and that he got to know them.

His greatest regret? He always wanted to go to the Holy Land, but back in the 80's, when the conflict reached the Sinai Peninsula and took Mt Sinai off all the travel itineraries, he decided that he'd never go. He was a very devout man, and the way he saw it, if he couldn't go to the place where Moses was handed the Ten Commandments, he didn't want to go at all.

He had some views that were reflective of his generation. He had some views that were reflective of his upbringing, and one or two of his views made me cringe. But one thing was certain - he never shied away from his opinion.

We're burying Grandpa tomorrow. It's going to be a tough day, but we'll get through it. I'll be expressing a few thoughts on behalf of the grandkids, and I suspect that I might have to stop a few times. But it's a weird thing, that losing someone who is so very old and who has lived such a full life should be so very sad. 'He's had a good innings,' people say. Yes, that's true, but with that comes the sobering knowledge that so much history and so many memories have been lost forever.