And So It Begins...

I have posted this picture before, but had to do so again. Here I am in the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee in the summer of 1969. Me, always the explorer, looking for adventure, the next new thing.

Tomorrow, I embark on a new journey, one that if someone told me last year I would be taking I would have looked at them like they were nuts. But here I am getting ready to head to Shanghai, China on the first of many more trips to the far east and beyond.

History has always been my first love, with Marco Polo being one of my favorite people to read about. His trip to China, Cathay as it was called then, changed the world at that time forever. One day I plan to go to Venice, a city, like Paris, that has always captured my soul.

But tomorrow it will be Shanghai, and with it a little kid from 43 Line Street in Charleston, SC will embark on a journey few or any in his former neighborhood has ever taken. I carry people like Mrs. Jackson. Aunt Bee, Mr. Charlie Moore, the Maxwells, Mrs. Duke, Ms. Eloise, the Venning family, Dr. Olasov. Dr. Fish, Ms. Cannon and Ms. Campbell and most of all, my parents. I carry them all with me tomorrow because this journey is really about them, not me. I am but a messenger, they are the message that even though they did not make it, someone from Line Street did.

Too much can't be made about this trip tomorrow because a culmination, of work, luck, perseverance, determination and fate made this so. I have no say in this, God, Allah....whoever is up there guiding me has the say. Many people have made the trip to China, so many haven't. The country is still a mystery and for most in this nation it always will be.

Tomorrow is the end, but yet the beginning of a new period in my life. What that is I have no earthly idea, but I now understand the preparation a power, much higher than myself put me through. This is the moment of truth for a young boy who always wanted to know what was out....there.