The Global Nomad Interviews: Rita Golden Gelman
[Mosque call to prayer]
The Global Nomad Interviews: Rita Golden Gelman
It was 1987 when I divorced and I said:
What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
It wasn't in the plan. And the answer was:
You're going to live your dream.
And I sold everything I owned. I kept a couple of pair of pants,
a couple of tops, and I never went back over all of the papers
and all of the books and all of the...
I just left and I took off and I haven't stopped since.
The dream was of course to get to know the world and to interact with people.
I'm not big on touristy things. I live with people wherever I go
and it started that way in Mexico and I never stopped.
Where have you been so far?
Oh my gosh.
I started in Los Angeles. That's where I was living when I divorced.
My kids, by the way, I've two kids and they were both out of the house and gone.
So I started Mexico, it was close. I was nervous.
I didn't know how I would behave in this world I was choosing.
So I went to Mexico which was close. And then from Mexico I went
back and forth a few times. I went to LA for various things,
went back to Mexico and then Guatemala, and then Nicaragua.
That was an interesting choice because in Nicaragua, the US was the enemy.
And I went down and discovered that the US was lying to us people
and Nicaragua wasn't anything like what I thought it would be.
And I loved the Nicaraguan people. And then I went to...
I spent a long time in Guatemala before Nicaragua.
And then I went to the Galapagos Island and I just kept going
and I didn't even make choices, sort of people came past my
presence and said we're going and I say hold on, wait a minute, I'm going too.
When I married him he was a sports writer.
He went from Sport magazine to Life magazine
and his first job at Life was entertainment editor.
It came with a lot of good perks. We went to every Broadway opening.
We went to all the openings of movies. We went to all kinds of glamorous
parties as press, you know.
We weren't stars but we were press but it was fun.
And a lot of it was wasted on me because I don't recognise movie stars.
So I kept thinking if my friend was here, she would be able to say
there is someone there. It was really a waste on me, but that was in New York.
He then became articles editor of Life magazine. We lost most of the privileges
but he was powerful. It was a powerful position.
Years later we lived in Greenwich Village in those days
during the time when Greenwich Village was a leader in protest in the country.
You know, it was a Vietnam war and it was a very exciting place to be.
You know, everything from gay rights which was
just beginning to protesting the war in Vietnam and I had had college years
of being very left-wing and very liberal so it was a good fit.
And I lived in Greenwich Village. My kids went to public school
and I have a couple of interesting public school stories if you want
but that's not about being a nomad, that's living.
And when they were 12 and 13, they were born in New York,
we moved to Los Angeles, not because of me but because of him.
He was a consultant to some top magazines so we got invited to everything.
We got invited to all of the movie openings, we got invited to parties
with the stars, the Emmys and the Academy Awards and all of that.
It wasn't my world. I was happy in that children's magazine.
But the first time was always fun.
The first time you go to the Academy Awards and the first time there's
a lot of pomp and ceremony.
And the Grammys, too, that was good, the music was great there.
But it really wasn't my world
and I didn't want a dress in sequins and go to but I did.
I don't think I did it all that well but I wasn't always in charge of clothes.
I guess I really felt freedom when I finally divorced and just took off
and I was free to be me.
He didn't like planes. At one point we went to Europe.
Our son was spending a year
in England at London School of Economics
and we took a boat, we took a ship across the ocean and back.
So we did not travel a lot but when we got there we did some travel.
And another point, I think, I can't be absolutely hundred percent sure,
he took the Concorde because it was going to get him there in a few minutes.
I took a regular airplane because I didn't care
and I was perfectly happy doing it. But we did go to Europe twice.
I've collected some statistics. Fifteen percent of the Americans have ever
left the North American continent, that means Mexico and Canada.
Fifteen percent. I feel sorry for them.
They'll never know the joy of connecting across cultures.
Their minds stay closed and they all think America is the best place
in the world. Your mind does funny things when you get out
into the world and discover it's not true.
Myopia, the nearsightedness of the people in the United States.
There are pockets of people who have been out of the country
and certainly the wealthy for the most part taking trips to Europe
to teach their children French and things like that, but there are blinders
on a huge portion of the American population.
We can't be a part of today's world if we don't know other countries.
if we don't connect with other people.
And every time I go out of the country, I see very few Americans.
And every time I go back into the country, I hear how dangerous it is out there.
I hear a fear of foreigners, you know in the world there are a lot foreigners.
I mean it's insane, it's crazy.
Everywhere I go people smile and invite me to their houses and buy me a coke.
And I thought and thought how do you change a country.
You can't tell them.
You can't tell someone that you should go out into the world because people are nice.
It just doesn't get across. They've got to actually experience it.
So who do you start with? My thinking is, you start with kids.
I went to Brandeis University in Massachusetts
and I knew that I was not going to spend my life in Bridgeport,
Fairfield, Connecticut.
I went straight to New York and I thought what in the world am I going to do.
How am I going to make a living? I was an English major.
English Lit. This is not a strong major to find a job.
There is not a lot of people looking for someone who knew Shakespeare.
So I went to employment agency. I had been editor of a high school newspaper
and I thought I can write so maybe I'll be a writer
but there were no jobs for writers and then I thought to myself, I'm 21 years old.
How can I write for grown-ups?
I'm still a kid and I thought how about children and I thought that will do.
I can write for children. I'm not kid anymore.
But a part of me is.
So I got a job at a children's magazine.
The children's magazine was called "Young Americans" and the only
slot available was as a file clerk, to be in charge of the files.
Now I have already mentioned probably 3 times that I am NOT an organised person.
File clerk is an organised person.
Files has to be organised and that was my job.
Inside of a few months, maybe four, three, I don't remember how long,
I messed up the files so badly that one day they came over to me and they said,
Rita, we'd like to make you a writer and that's how I became a writer
for children.
This is the most popular one. it's still in print.
it's called "More spaghetti I say".
It's about a monkey who can't stop eating spaghetti.
And she's funny and she's cute and she eats it with marshmallows
and she eats it... doesn't matter what she eats it with.
She rides in the spaghetti and hides in spaghetti.
And I get lots and lots of good press from this book.
After 15 years of getting emails and talking to people who said how can you do it,
I was having lunch in Manhattan with an old friend and she said:
Really, you're a writer, you tell such good stories, why aren't you writing it?
And I said: Oh Mary Ann, Steve would be very upset to read about himself
in a book that I had written so I'm not writing it.
And she looked at me, and she knew both of us,
she was a friend of both of us, and she said, "You've been divorced for 15 years.
Is he still controlling you?" I started the book the next day.
And this is the book that I finished.
It's "Tales of a female nomad". It was an easy sale.
I got an agent who loved the proposal and she sent it out to
nine different people and the very first or second person she sent it to,
which was Random House, bought it and published it.
And then I wrote it. It wasn't a book, it was a proposal.
Once you start, once you realise that almost everyone you meet
wants to bring you into their home and give you a cup of coffee
and feed you dinner and take you to the ceremony they're having that night
It's just so much joy if you get out there and it's hard to stop.
Once you've done it, you're going to do it again and again.
What a wonderful addiction!
Can I have an in-depth major conversation in Indonesian?
Probably not anymore and I'm not sure I ever could.
I speak Spanish. I spent a lot of years in Spanish-speaking countries.
Could I have today? Probably if I spend three or four months in the country
I could pull it off, but it disappears.
I learn ten sentences when I come to a country and not where's the bathroom
but asking questions, do you have a family and how many children do you have.
That kind of questions.
The minute I step across the border to leave to go to another country,
it all disappears and it doesn't get easier with age so
I forget more easily than I used to.
I had birthday in July and I turned 75.
I get tired more easily than I used to and if I do, I rest.
I'm not running from tourist spot to tourist spot.
I'm living my life.
I carry a computer so I can lie in bed with my knees up and my computer
on my knees and answer emails. Or blog.
I have a website and I'm writing about Turkey on the blog at the moment.
And I've been doing that since I got here, maybe once a week, once another week.
I also have a listserv where I ask people if they want to hear from me now and then.
And my email is in the book which is how that happened.
And I've got over 1,500 people on my listserv so I just put one address in the email
and all these people get it and I can say anything I want.
If I get an interesting thing about a gap year program offering scholarship, I'll throw it in there.
If I get an interesting, I don't know, Facebook or link, and I think anybody
who's interested in me and travel and my book, might be also interested,
and I send that out. It's fun.
So if I am bored, I can always talk to people who have written to me.
Or do nothing. I'm not great at doing nothing but I'm a lot better than I used to be.
When my mother was sick, I was out there in the world.
And I hired a whole team of people to take care of her.
And they were all Spanish- speaking immigrants in the US.
And I became friendly with a lot of them.
I'm still in touch with these people and it was way back.
But I went places with them and I saw how Americans talk to them
so they were ignorant.
One of them was the head of a Montessori School when she was in Colombia.
Her husband was a college professor in the US and people talked down to her
because she had a foreign accent. So, I think the unknown is scary
and the only way to make the unknown known is to get out there and discover it
and then it changes almost immediately. The smiles you get.
The invitations you get. But you have to be there doing it, too.
I have four travel rules: Smile a lot, talk to strangers, which is something of course
that your parents always told you don't ever do, accept all invitations,
again, those little voices in your head from your childhood are saying "Oh you better say no",
and the last one is eat everything you're offered.
So those would be my four rules when you go out of the country and it
brings invitations in and it lets people know that you're open learning about them
and ask a lot of questions, be curious about where you are,
and what they're doing and do it with them.
The only thing that is holding my freedom back is health.
I'm relatively healthy but I'm also achy here and there.
Right now we're on the fourth floor of a hostel and it's an effort for me
to get to the fourth floor and down and up and down several times a day,
so that's limiting, but in terms of going
where I want to go, or even if it's a country that isn't all that friendly,
I mean I'm not going to pop myself into Afghanistan or Syria at this point
even though it's pretty close but I am free and I'm free to do what I want.
I don't ask permission of anyone. My parents are no longer alive.
And my kids know me well enough to know that if I want to go somewhere, I'm going to go.
In the very beginning I had a wallet stolen but I didn't have my passport in it.
I was doing all the right things. I had a band around my leg with my passport
and things like that. I don't even do that anymore.
But nothing dangerous has ever happened. I've never been mugged.
I had a taxi driver who took me to the wrong place but that happens wherever I am.
Taxi drivers are not my favourite people. If they can't find where you're going,
they drive up somewhere, pull over to the curb, and tell you you're there
and take your things out of the trunk, but nothing dangerous.
And everything positive.
I never know exactly where I'm going to go.
I kind of wait for something to come across my path.
Yesterday I got an invitation to go to Hungary
and I thought, I've never been to Hungary, and it's a possibility
and the invitation said you can stay as long as you want.
I don't think he realises quite how long I might stay,
but I don't like to make plans
because then when an invitation comes along, I can't accept it.
So there are places that I haven't been, a lot of places,
because I stay a long time in one place.
So it's not as though I have a list of countries that I'm checking off.
I spent eight years basically in Indonesia and Borneo
and New Guinea with tribal people.
I never knew I was going there until I got there and
suddenly someone was moving on to somewhere that sounded interesting.
One of the things, well, this is sort of unusual for me,
Alaska which is part of the U.S. of course but it's not attached.
It's the last frontier of the United States and I have a feeling
there are interesting people there.
My latest trip was what's interesting.
I was giving a talk. I was still in the US and I'd been there during that period of time.
And I gave a talk in the bookstore and someone came up to me.
She said: Rita, "I read your book number of years ago and I loved it and
I came to hear you talk today and I think I loved your talk and I love you.
I'm a flight attendant for Delta and I would like to offer you a buddy pass.
Anywhere you want to go or anywhere Delta goes."
So I flew to Turkey on a buddy pass.
That was very nice. You pay a certain amount, but nothing
like what I would have paid had I bought a regular ticket.
So that really got me out of the country.
It was the first time I have ever flown first class.
It was very nice. A lot of attention.
Champagne and wine and a little bag. They put in all kinds of little
things that used to be on international flights but I don't
think they do that anymore.
You know, with an eye mask and shampoo and all kinds of goodies,
and constant attention.
And a seat that you can almost go flat in. So that was a very nice experience.
So first class would be high on that list of transportation that I like
but I'm never going to pay for it.
Do I have travel plans? No. I'm in Turkey now.
I am going back to the US on the 17th of this month
which is just not even 10 days, no, 10 days exactly.
And I was going to be a grandma. I already am a grandma.
He's eight years old and his mother is in school away from home.
So I'm moving in and I'm going to be an official grandmother which
I'm looking forward to, he is very cute.
His name is Chris Gelman and we're gonna hang out together for a few months.
After that I have no plans.
My life is about connecting.
It's connecting with people wherever I am.
Even in the U.S.
It's connecting with people, it's connecting across classes,
it's connecting across languages, it's connecting across borders.
The learning is a part of what connecting is all about.
I ask people questions. I want to know how they eat,
I want to know what they do, I want to know what's fun for them
And what's sad for them and I want to live their lives.
I want to live other people's lives and see what they're like.
And I think if I had to put one word to the meaning of life
that would be connecting, because it brings joy and joy is a spiritual thing.
Joy is not just being happy or doing something you like.
It fills your body with a certain kind of passion
and love of waking up every morning
knowing that you're going to connect with ideas you've never heard,
foods you've never tasted, ways of life that are new to you.
All of this is just magical for me.
And I don't want to stop. At a certain point I'm sure I'm going to have to,
but for now I'm loving what I'm doing and I'm not planning on stopping
until I absolutely can't get out of bed in the morning.
I think if I could get all these people who speak and look like me
to get out into the world and learn what other people,
how they speak and what they look like,
I think I would change the world.
Obviously peace is the bottom line of it all
and peace comes when you all of a sudden realise
that everyone out there is just like you.
The most poignant moment of my 27 years wandering the world
was brief and beautiful. I was in New Guinea.
I had been in Bali for many years and all of a sudden
a German guy came to the village where I was living.
And Michael told me he was leading a group of two men
to the island of New Guinea, the Irian Jaya half of the island
which is Indonesia and I said I want to come.
So Michael, these two Germans and I met in Irian Jaya.
It was a tour but before I met Michael, I decided
I was going to go early and get to a different valley.
Michael's trip was mostly on a boat but this valley
is where you start out to go up into the mountains of Irian Jaya
where, I think it was in the late thirties
the rest of the world discovered there were tribes in these mountains
extremely traditional tribes, the kind of tribes that have
face paints and bones in their noses and
something around their neck.
The men are virtually naked except for a penis gourd.
They grow these gourds.
Most of them are wearing some kind of stones or shells
around their necks.
The only other bit of clothing they have is a gourd.
Some of them are big and wide, some of them are tall and narrow,
some of them have a wiggle and when I was there
I thought these guys live in these wooden huts
and I had this image of a shelf on these wood and straw huts
and on this shelf were gourds.
And the guy wakes up in the morning and says, "What do I feel like today?"
They hold these gourds on with a string around the top
and the string around the testicles.
And I got there because I wanted to go into these hills.
And I found three women in the Manna valley.
Two Austrian, one from Namibia, all of us white, all of us covered
from the tops of our necks to the bottom of our shoes
because it's malaria country.
And we got together and decided we were going to take a tour.
They were all a lot younger. Most of my life I spent with a lot younger people
because most people at my age are not doing what I'm doing.
And my contribution, I knew I was going to slow them down hiking
in these mountains, but my contribution was that I spoke Indonesian
and we didn't have to have a guide who spoke English so it was cheaper.
So my contribution to this little voyage was Indonesian.
And off we went and it was the first village we came to,
uphills and downhills, across rivers on bamboo poles.
I was scared. I'm not very good at heights and I would look down
I would see rocks and rivers but I did it,
not because I wanted to climb the mountains,
but because I knew what was up there.
We got to the first village after a hard day and it was like Edmund Hillary
climbing hill Kilimanjaro: we had a guide, a local guide,
the guide had a cook, each one of us had somebody who was carrying our bags,
and the cook had somebody who carried his,
so this team of people went off into the mountains.
And we got to the first village and our cook cooked us dinner
and outside are all of these men wearing penis gourds
were waiting for us to finish our meal.
I had no idea what was going to happen.
We finished and they led us, this group of men,
led the four women into another hut
and we sat across from each other and we were staring at each other
and I turned to the women. I'd just met them the day before.
I turned to the women and said, "Do you now any English songs?"
And we came up with "You are my sunshine", "Home on the range"
and "Oh what a beautiful morning".
And I turned to the men. Now they were speaking a tribal language,
but the head of their village spoke Indonesian,
and I said in Indonesian: "I would like to thank you
for all of us, for your exclusive forest, for letting us see the cockatoos
and the orchids growing in the trees and for allowing us to stay
in your village tonight and we thank you.
Now we will sing to you." And we sang our three songs.
We had never sung before, we had never talked, barely.
We finished the three songs and I turned to them and I said, "Now it is your turn."
A concept I didn't know they would understand.
They huddled together, gathered up and began to sing.
And the first two songs they sang were clearly taught to them by missionaries.
You can hear the harmony, you know the sound of a church song
and that's what they were.
The third song came from deep in their tribal history
and it went something like
[Rita is imitating the tribal song]
and someone in the background is going [Rita is imitating the tribal song]
and somebody else is going [Rita is imitating the tribal song]
Tears are streaming down my face.
I'm in the middle of Irian Jaya New Guinea and
this group of tribal people is singing to me.
And then they finished and they said now it is your turn.
I turned to the women and we came up with
"Old MacDonald had a farm" and we sang the song with an oink-oink here
and a moo moo here and a quack quack there laughing.
The men are laughing, we're laughing.
These guys, opposite ends of the spectrum of life on earth.
And here we are sitting there singing with a quack quack here and
when we finished our song I said to them, "Would you teach us your song?"
And again laughter. There was no difference. We were the same.
And they're laughing and we're laughing
and we all have tears in our eyes because we're doing it together
and when they finish trying to teach us
which was not easy, we didn't do it well
which is why there was so much laughter
they turned to us and said,
"Would you teach us your song?"
We are in the middle of Irian Jaya,
in the middle of the mountains of New Guinea
and we're all going with a quack quack here
and a moo moo here, laughing and laughing.
I have tears in my eyes just talking about it.
it was the most poignant moment of what my life is about.
It's about connecting, it's about the sameness of humanity
wherever you go.
And I wanted to stay there forever but we had to move on
and the P.S. on this is that the next day -- we slept in their village --
and the very next day we went on to another village.
By the time we got there,
the new village was eagerly awaiting the travelling minstrel show.
And it happened again.
It was the most poignant moment of 27 years.
I wish I could have stayed longer
and sung more, but it's the most dramatic story I can tell about
the sameness of humanity wherever you go.
[Tribal female choir singing]
"Nomad", "Spaghetti", "Female Nomad and Friends"
"Female Nomad and Friends" is the one that's a charity
so that one you have to buy.
Thank you!