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Travels with Dad I: Travel Clears the Mind

People travel for lots of reasons. My father traveled in order to develop new prejudices.

Rodney Fertel swore by the virtues of travel and he trekked around the world at least a dozen times, He took me abroad in my teens, opening new worlds that I value to this day. But to my Dad, travel existed to clarify stereotypes. The Irish were this and the English were that and the French, oh my God, the French . . ..

By the time we hit Basel, Switzerland the summer I was 15, I thought I was fairly inured to these pronouncements. One morning, as we sat down to a breakfast of muesli, he announced “The Swedes are very rigid.”

“ Dad,” I couldn’t help myself, “they’re Swiss.”

“The Swedes are very rigid.”

“ No, Dad, they aren’t Swedes. The Swedes live in Sweden. In Switzerland, it’s the Swiss.”

“ They don’t care what I call them.”

“ Dad, it would be like if someone called you an Armenian rather than an American.”

“ They don’t care what I call them. Wait, I’ll show you, I’ll ask the waiter.”

Now, imagine, what can that crisp, upstanding (not to say rigid) Swiss waiter have thought when my father called him over and posed that question? Out of the blue, with no context, what would such a question mean? “Do you mind if I call you a Swede?” Whichever way you construe it, it just doesn’t parse.

I was too mortified to listen to his reply. But I’m certain that, whatever it was, it confirmed my father’s opinion of the Swedes, er, the Swiss.

I was dying. Fifteen and very grateful to be on the Grand Tour, but I was dying.

Thank God the Swiss have a long tradition of neutrality. Questions like that can start a war – or at least ruin your breakfast.