The woman seemed surprised to hear that, when on assignment, I never travel with my wife. “I don’t like to be distracted,” I explained.
“Is she so beautiful?” the woman asked.
A friend recently posted a photo on Facebook of his New York hotel: the stunning TWA Flight Center at JFK, designed in 1962 by Eero Saarinen and saved from demolition by preservationists with deep pockets. I walked through that terminal on Mother’s Day 1973 to catch the plane that would take me to London – where I hoped to find a summer job before my senior year of college – and, ultimately, a career as a travel writer. It was the first of many solo journeys, and my mother always said she never forgot the sight of me walking unaccompanied down that long, tubular corridor.
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.