I was honored to be a guest on Ryan Murdock's excellent podcast Personal Landscapes. For a delightful hour we talked about Poland, the Cold War, travel books, travel writing, and even movies, including the usefulness of screenplays in learning a second language.
On my flight to Chicago last week I sat next to an older woman whose husband, sitting by the window, kept the shade down the entire flight. This is behavior I fail to understand; even if you’re unmoved by cloud formations, don’t you want to see the moment you “slip the surly bonds of Earth”? Even more vital for me is a view of the landing, knowing when to expect the gratifying jolt of wheels on tarmac. If I had a smaller prostate I would always book a window seat – and keep the shade up the entire flight.
Not this man. He kept working on his crossword as we taxied to the gate, which, at O’Hare, is a considerable journey. We had flown over a thousand miles and he had no interest in seeing what the landscape or weather were like in this new place. Perhaps, I thought, he has an eye condition that makes him sensitive to bright light. But then why would he book a window seat?
Finally, moved by some unprecedented spark of curiosity, he lifted the shade two inches to peer out. I leaned over greedily, demonstrably, to catch a glimpse at the great outdoors before he banned it from sight.
“Do you want him to open the shade?” the woman asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been sitting in a tube for the last three hours.”
He obliged. A few seconds later, we arrived at the gate.
Friday I flew to Chicago for the Printers Row Lit Fest. It was my first outing since my bronchitis and I had a number of concerns, not least of which was my cough, which is dormant much of the time but still active and, occasionally, disruptive.
The weather in Chicago was unseasonably cool, as it is wherever I travel (I am a one-man defense against global warming) so Friday evening I went to a restaurant near my hotel. It was Japanese and the two couples at the neighboring table were speaking Polish. Ah, Chicago.
I said something to them in Polish and they asked, kindly, if I were Polish. I said I was American, but had lived in Poland for two and a half years. I mentioned that I had just written a book about Poland, and that I was presenting it tomorrow at the book festival. The one couple, Maria and Tomek, said they would come hear me.
They not only came – they each bought a book. Theirs may now be the only household in America with two copies of Falling into Place.
Thirty-five years ago this week I started my job as travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (then the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel). I would hold the job for the next 19 years, visiting parts of the world – the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Australia – I had never been to before. In 2003 I published a book, A Way to See the World, comprised of stories I’d written for the paper (possibly the last collection of newspaper travel stories ever published). The Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared – either with selected stories or under “Notables” in the back – in the first nine editions of The Best American Travel Writing. The anthology, which debuted in 2000, was discontinued after 2021.
A friend recently sent me one of those surveys of countries, this one ranking them in order of kindness to strangers. Japan came in last, just below Poland. The countries where I’ve felt the most welcome – Vietnam and Turkey – were not on the list, nor was China. There’s a word in Chinese, which I don’t remember, for the circle of family and friends who are important to you; anyone who falls outside it is not worth your attention, let alone concern. You can understand it, sort of, in a country with such a huge population. Poland has a little of that – a leftover, ironically, from Communism perhaps; Poles don’t generally talk to strangers, which I find infuriating. But they should get some points for taking in over a million Ukrainians.
At my Villanova reunion this weekend I took a tour of the campus trees. I had always loved the leafiness of the place but never paid much attention to individual trees.
Our group was small, predominantly female, and included two young women who worked for the university. Our guide, a white-haired Irishman, spoke with passion about each tree we stopped at. These included magnolias, ginkos, an American larch, a Japanese cedar, a paperback maple, and many more. The highlight was the weeping beech, which our guide entered, and we after him, as if into a secret vault. And there, awestruck, we stood encased in leaves and branches. The aspect of shelter was heightened by the fact that it was several degrees cooler than the world outside. Had we not taken the tour, we never would have known about this hidden realm, this hushed green dome, though the carved names and hearts on the trunk and branches showed that generations of students had discovered it.