Saturday morning took mom down the street to the Nazareth Farmers' Market, where we admired the cauliflower and broccoli and bought molasses cookies and sticky buns from a man wearing a long white beard and a straw hat.
We drove across the bridge into New Jersey, heading past Harker's Hollow golf course to Apgar's for apple cider. Then we made our way south to Frenchtown, driving up and down the side streets admiring the porches, many of them decorated for Halloween. The two chairs of one porch held a well-dressed zombie couple.
We crossed the Milford bridge into Pennsylvania and curved along the river road up to Easton and back to Nazareth. Downtown I stopped at a red light and a woman getting out of the passenger side of a car that had just parked said hello to me.
In the evening we drove back to Easton for dinner at the River Grille with my brother Jim and his wife Joyce. I mentioned the Mexican place south of the circle, and Jim said Easton had become a restaurant town. Back at mom's, we watched Penn State beat Michigan in triple overtime.
At breakfast Sunday morning, mom said: "I think these are the best sticky buns I've ever eaten." At 93, she's had a fair number of them.
Perhaps next year the Swedes will smile on Colin Thubron and do for travel writing what they just did for the short story.
The article in Sunday's New York Times Style/Travel magazine (what do you call that thing?) about New Orleans was written by a woman who had moved there from Manhattan with her husband, as if the presence of former New Yorkers in the city was what made it worthy of coverage.
My dismay over the changing of the guard at Conde Nast Traveler is more professional than personal. Klara Glowczewska had a nice long run, as did I in a far less luxurious branch of the business. When mine came to an end I wrote to her and proposed a column reflecting on the world and Americans’ often touching, sometimes comical, efforts to get to know it (a monthly version of the biweekly column that I had been able to pull off for 19 years in the Sunday Travel section of a midsized newspaper in Florida). She declined, saying that front-of-the-book space was extremely tight, the front-of-the-book being the part of the magazine devoted to products that often had only a tenuous connection to travel. This came from a woman who, in her spare time, translated Ryszard Kapuscinski. Now we wait to see how the magazine will fare under the direction of a woman who, in her past life, edited Martha Stewart.
The nostalgia that normally accompanies a return to a former home is magnificently tempered when that home was formally communist. (One of many lines cut from my story about Warsaw that appears in the August-September issue of National Geographic Traveler.)
Every time I return to the city it looks better than it did the last time I saw it, with the exception of the carved wooden figures at Cepelia. The themes are still the same - angels, saints, nativity scenes, wedding parties, Christ worrying - but the execution seems a bit mass produced. They've lost a little of the naive quality that made them so attractive. I'm glad I collected when the collecting was good.