When I was a girl I had two grown-up dreams: to be an actress and to go to Paris, France. Never mind frilly wedding dresses, babies bouncing on my knee, or an overstuffed home full of ornate furnishings. I wanted to be in front of the camera, preferably while speaking French. Oh, wait, now that I think about it, I did that on ABC Primetime on an episode of "What Would You Do."
Huh. I forgot about that.
Last Sunday I returned from my first European excursion to where? You guessed it. Paris. For the first three days I couldn't stop taking pictures. "Oh my goodness, look at that beautiful fountain! Wow, another amazing building! Awesome, cool cobblestone street! Mmmmm....this coffee is ah-mazing." Around day 4 the camera came out of my pocket less frequently as Paris had ceased working its charm. I started paying more attention to the kamikaze scooter riders. I begrudged that some shops were closed on Saturday. I started to get serious cravings for a restaurant that served fresh fruit and vegetables.
"What the hell, Hiatt?" I chided myself. "This is Paris freaking France! You should be enjoying every single last second of this. You have no idea when you'll ever get back here, IF you ever get back here. You made your dream come true! Isn't that enough!?"
On our second to last night in Paris, one of my traveling companions asked me what I thought of the City of Lights. And I said, "the Parisians have been absolutely lovely. They have been kind, helpful, thoughtful, and sweet. There are beautiful buildings to look at and great little neighborhoods and I feel like an ungrateful prig to walk away from a trip to Paris and say, 'Paris? Meh. It was okay.' But I have to be honest. Traveling to a city like this is not what I like for a vacation. It is not the change of pace one craves when hiking around Manhattan seven days a week carrying a 30 lb. bag. I haven't had one moment in this city where my heart opened up and I felt like 'my gosh, this is the dream. This is what I thought Paris would be.'"
Since being back in NYC, I have pondered my reaction to my "dream come true." Such expectations lurk nefariously behind every reverie and only serve to take away from the dream's beauty. It is a possibility that I expected too much from Paris, that I had made the dream bigger than the city itself.
As I examine other "dreams" in my life, I realize that I may have soiled them with the same set of unexamined longings, that the things I think I never got I may have had but didn't acknowledge because it wasn't what I thought it should be. It didn't match the picture in my head.
It begs the question, is it the dreamer's job to create exactly as one thinks it should be and keep creating until it is just so, or take the framework as opposed to the whole?
Perhaps, too, it is okay to acknowledge that dreams change. I never owned a pair of hiking boots until my 27th year, and now I have a pair that are so completely smoothed on the soles they are practically useless for the slickrock scramble. I never, as I dreamed of being a Broadway star sporting a fashionable beret, considered that a pair of hiking boots would be my most prized possession. The point is, that now as I daydream (stealing from Thoreau) "even in an afternoon ramble, the needle always settled west." I search for "a sense of bigness outside ourselves (Sherwood Anderson); we all need something to take the 'shrillness out of us." (Stegner).
Did Paris take the "shrillness" out of me? No. Did it make me feel small in the world, miss my loved ones, and gain even more appreciation for the incredibly bright and funny women I was traveling with? Yes. If dreams coming true is being with the people you love, seeing a part of the world I have always wanted to see, and being an actress, then yes, my wishes prevailed. It may not be exactly what I had in mind nor did I reach it by the route I had planned, but I am here, face to the sun.
