Early one morning, two weeks before my husband, our 3-year-old daughter, and I were flying to Morocco for a vacation, my father called. "You cannot go to Morocco," he said. There'd been two bombings in Casablanca. The U.S. embassy had been shut down, he said, and officials had warned Americans to stay at home.
Because our airfare and accommodations were nonrefundable; because I had spent a summer in Morocco 14 years before and was nostalgically determined to recapture, however briefly and lamely, my expatriate, Paul Bowlesian self; and because my father tends to poetically paraphrase news articles with an eye toward disaster, I responded, "I'm sure it will be fine."
Though I dismissed my father's imaginative worries (the consulate had closed, not the embassy, and its employees had been urged to stay home, not all Americans), his phone call made me realize that when it came to matters of staying alive while on vacation, becoming a parent had psychically bifurcated me. While the Old Me careened toward stupidity-based foreign travel, the New Me did Internet searches, read the State Department advisories (extremely helpful in determining the many ways we might die abroad), polled her friends. Would they take their children to Morocco under such circumstances? Was Morocco an unusually reckless destination, or had possible-death-by-terrorist become reclassified, in these uncertain times, as an acceptable holiday risk?
My brother delivered the most lucid advice. "It's statistically extremely unlikely that any of you will be killed," he said. "The question is, will the worry that one of you will be killed ruin your vacation?"
I embraced statistics. Given that my family lives every day in New York City, sadly no stranger to terrorism, it seemed absurd, even slightly prejudicial (this was the Old Me talking), to believe Morocco had any special claim to danger. We were just as likely to die staying home. We flew to Morocco.
What had made my Moroccan summer of 14 years before so memorable had been the people I'd met and their insane hospitality. They had fed me. They had invited me to live with them. This time, we hadn't even boarded our flight to Casablanca before a stranger invited us to his nephew's wedding the following weekend in Marrakech. "Call me," said the stranger, giving me a phone number. The New Me pocketed his card, thinking, The Old Me would go to the wedding. What would the New Me do?
Next Page: Not the Same Morocco
