Jennifer Brady, the American tennis player originally from Mechanicsburg, PA, has earned a spot in the women's final of the Australian Open.
"Mechanicsburg - that storied town, my own private Mayberry! Even today it is difficult for me to recognize as a real grandmother anyone who doesn't live in a place with stout corner churches and red-brick sidewalks and gravelly alleys that all seem to lead to Rakestraw's Ice Cream, whose double-dip cones we always somehow found room for after Grandma's fried chicken and graham cracker pie. Mechanicsburg conditioned me early to expect glad rewards at the end of a long journey."
- from the introduction to A Way to See the World
Trinidad's Carnival, which was cancelled this year, has multiple personalities that reveal themselves throughout the celebration. This description of the winding down is from A Way to See the World:
"On Ariapita Street, the steel band Exodus took the lead. The soothing, unamplified music of pans. Men and women in the garb of sailors, many of them older, soft-shoed it up front. They set feet to tapping in lawn chairs strung along the sidewalk, and straw hats bobbing on wooden porches. They passed, with a certain defiance, Lapeyrouse Cemetery. The setting sun elongated their shadows as the strains of "Heavy Roller" - by the great Lord Kitchner - tickled the air.
"That night other steel bands roamed the streets of Port-of-Spain, their fatigued supporters shuffling behind them. The sound of pans splintered off in a dozen directions, like the light carried by candles from a Greek Easter Eve mass."
Published yesterday: My story about Miami's finest and most overlooked street: https://www.qgdigitalpublishing.com/publication/?m=63081&i=693114&p=18
Recently, in a lovely New York Times essay on Paris during the pandemic, Roger Cohen called the French capital the "most northern of southern cities.”
I’ve never thought of Paris as a southern city yet I guess I know what he means: it’s a city of outdoor cafes and a few well-used parks. But I wonder if he’s ever been to Krakow. In Poland’s southern city (which is still north of Paris), architectural influences range from the Moors to the Italian Renaissance. Instead of monotonous gray, facades are a mix of earth tones and pastels. People outnumber cars on the narrow streets, and nuns scurry about as if in Vatican City. In summer, Market Square becomes a showcase for la dolce vita, its café terraces filled with tourists and locals who, it almost surprises you to hear, speak fluent Polish.
I subscribed to HBO Max because it carried two movies that promised – at least to my vulnerable, house-arrested mind – the enticements of travel.
The first, The Flight Attendant, had little travel and a lot that was implausible, beginning with the main character’s behavior. It was a struggle to make it through the first episode.
The second, Let Them All Talk, takes place on a crossing of the Queen Mary 2. As someone who sailed to France in 1975 on the QE2 – taking advantage of a special and short-lived youth fare – I was looking forward to this one. (The shipboard experience was so delightful I sailed home one year later on the Mikhail Lermontov. Those were the days.) Also, it is about a writer (played by Meryl Streep) who invites her two college friends (Dianne Wiest and Candace Bergen) to join her on the voyage.
I thrilled to views of the ship – the galley, the staterooms, the library, even the shot of churned waves outside the window as Wiest and Bergen play Scrabble – and cringed every time that Streep appeared. Her character is everyone’s worst nightmare of the pompous author, and further grates by rarely uttering a sentence without a long pause somewhere in the middle. The acting was good, and the screenplay was interesting, but it portrayed the contemporary crowd on trans-Atlantic crossings – at least to this viewer, who made three of them with dreams of becoming a travel writer – as jaded and grim. Sad to think this may be the movie’s most realistic aspect.
Christopher Elliott, the syndicated columnist, recently published an article titled: "What's missing from pandemic-era travel?" My contribution was: "I miss people. Now, after traveling thousands of miles, we're still supposed to keep our distance. Gone is the handshake, the touch on the arm - the small gestures that make a traveler feel welcome. Not to mention the smiles now lost behind facemasks."