Last week I took a 6:40 a.m. flight back home from Philadelphia because anything later would have cost me $400 dollars.
I returned my car to Budget around 4:30. There were two other people on the shuttle. “Have a blesséd flight,” the African-American driver said, with the sincerity of a preacher at the end of the service. “Have a blesséd day.”
To my astonishment, the airport was abuzz with activity. Never had I seen so many cheapskates gathered in one place.
At book signings, it’s best to stand at the back of the line – that’s where the author’s friends, colleagues, and most dedicated readers congregate. For Pico Iyer at Books & Books Saturday morning, this group included his former editor at Time magazine, a schoolteacher carrying the letter he’d received from the author some twenty years earlier praising the story he’d published in the Sun-Sentinel on traveling to the Philippines in search of a wife, and a tall man dragging a bag filled with books.
Randall was a book collector and jazz guitarist, professor emeritus from the Frost School of Music. He had gotten hooked on travel writing, he said, after reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar.
I mentioned that I was a travel writer and Randall asked if I’d ever heard of Anthony Daniels. I said I had his book on Central America. “Sweet Waist of America,” he said, politely refraining from mentioning that the book covered only Guatemala. “He sometimes writes under another name,” I said. “Theodore Dalrymple,” Randall replied, quickly triaging my second memory lapse. (In my defense, the English writer, who is also a psychiatrist, rarely comes up in everyday conversation.) Randall informed me that Daniels wrote one book, a satire about Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere, using the pen name Thursday Msigwa.
His favorite travel writer, he said, was Norman Lewis. I told him that Pico had visited Lewis, and written a delightful profile of him, a few years before he died. This seemed to be the sole fragment of travel writing to have escaped Randall’s notice. We moved on to my favorites: Patrick Leigh Fermor and Colin Thubron. Rarely had waiting in line been so enjoyable.
Watching Notre Dame burn yesterday I tried to console myself with the memory of my visit to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, where hundreds of Japanese gazed with unqualified rapture at the latest version, built in 1955.
Our trip to Texas coincided with wildflower season, but I returned with more photos of people than of blossoms.
Our last night in Texas, sipping tea outside Jo’s on South Congress Ave. in Austin, we got talking to the young woman sitting with her smartphone next to us. She was a junior in high school, she told us, down from Fort Worth to have a look at the University of Texas. She was considering some other schools – the University of Georgia, the University of the South, Georgetown – but figured she’d probably end up, as her brother and her parents did, at UT. Her interest was in the classics; she studied Latin and was going on a summer trip to Italy and Greece – her first visit to Europe.
After about ten minutes of conversation she looked down at her phone and said, “I think my Uber driver is here.” She asked our names, put out her hand, and introduced herself as Katherine. This impressed us as much as anything we’d seen in our ten-day visit to Texas.
While reading about her far-flung experiences with simians, Leila came to the part where a monkey on Gibraltar reached into her bag and ran off with her husband’s ashes. An alarmed silence came over the room. Then she read the next sentence: “He would have loved it.”