Yesterday morning we arrived at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport early, as prescribed, and, after making our way through security, went to El Central for a delicious breakfast of huevos rancheros. During the meal, no less than four staff members stopped by to ask us how our food was.
Arriving at the gate, we learned that our flight was going to be delayed due to storms in Fort Lauderdale that had held up the departure of our plane. We took seats facing the corridor where I read Lauren Groff’s Florida while occasionally looking up and observing the passing parade of summer travelers.
Our plane arrived but, an announcement informed us, there was a problem with one of the engines, and we would have to wait for the next plane from Florida. Hania and I headed off and took a seat at the bar of Legal Sea Foods, where I had a crab cake that was make up almost entirely of crabmeat and Hania had gluten-free fried calamari. Back at the gate, I read another short story set in Florida.
We boarded at around 2 pm, four hours after we were supposed to. Not long after takeoff I found on the screen in front of me the Women’s European Championship soccer match between England and Sweden. This proved to be more of a distraction than the pageant of travelers in the terminal had been. While we were in the air, England scored four goals, including one on a back kick as the player was moving away from the goal, something I had never seen before, by a male or female player.
We landed in Fort Lauderdale around four-thirty. It had been an extremely enjoyable day of travel.
The current issue of Condé Nast Traveler features an article on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca that contains this sentence: “That evening I went for an early dinner at Kakurega, an omakase place, perched under a palapa, that has brought gastronomic cred to Punta Pájaros.” Reading this I suddenly felt no desire to go to Punta Pájaros.”
In Miami Beach on Monday I met a Swiss woman who lives in a town of 6,000 people and no automobiles. Zermatt. She was in the U.S., along with representatives from other Swiss regions, to promote tourism to her country.
The woman from Basel showed a picture of herself swimming in the Rhine, which cuts her town in two. She held up a bag and explained that you put your clothes in it and then use it as a kind of floatation device as you drift down the river. I tried to picture Roger Federer floating through town with a bag full of clothes.
Federer, the woman had told me earlier, is on the city’s Walk of Fame. I asked who else is there.
“Herzog and de Meuron,” she said, then added, “they’re architects.”
“They designed our most famous parking garage,” I said. “It’s about five blocks from here.”
A commission they would not have gotten in Zermatt.
A quick weekend trip to a family reunion in Lancaster had me flying into Trenton, where I got my first newspaper job, and then renting a car and heading west. Friday evening I drove the back roads of Amish country, watching men in fields riding horse-drawn plows and women in bonnets hoeing in gardens. Saturday evening, strolling the streets of Princeton, I saw packs of people dressed in orange and black for alumni weekend. (One man sat on a bench on Nassau Street holding a ceramic tiger.) Last evening, arriving home, I drove from the airport to A1A and gazed at the women in bikinis and the men in tattoos. And I was struck not just by the variety of the world, but the variety of three worlds I know quite well.
I heard P.J. O’Rourke speak at Brown University in 1988. He had recently published Holidays in Hell, a collection of dispatches from the world's trouble spots. I had picked it up in a bookstore one day and turned doubtfully to the chapter on Poland. Then I stood in the aisle, awed and humbled, for the next thirty minutes. O’Rourke had dropped into Poland, without a word of Polish, and perfectly captured the spirit of the place, at least as a recalcitrant socialist state. He described things that for me, after two and a half years, had become commonplace but now, presented through his undulled eyes, appeared afresh in all their absurdity. He was funny of course, but with jokes that revealed truths while also provoking laughter. Which are the best kind.
The audience at Brown was made up partly of students who had found sections of the book insensitive and come to demonstrate their disapproval. They took up whole rows, many of them with white T-shirts over their blouses and long-sleeved shirts; a few carried signs.
O’Rourke walked onto the stage and, standing at the lectern, began his talk. He paid no attention to the protestors, who were impossible to miss, with their signs now raised. Not wanting to infringe on his right to speak, they didn’t heckle or harangue; they just sat quietly in pockets of shared hurt. Then, after about 15 minutes, they stood up, held hands, and, row by row, silently vacated the hall. When their exodus was about two-thirds complete, O’Rourke halted his presentation for the first time.
“They’re cute,” he said, looking out over the last of the retreating minions. “No, really, they are. In my day we would have burned the building down.”