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.
In May of 1994 I spent a week in Normandy, researching stories to run on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. It was one of the best and most moving trips I took in my 19 years as a travel editor, and it culminated in my finding, in the small town of Vouilly, Le Château that had served as the press corps’ headquarters in the days immediately following the invasion. Since then it had been turned into a bed & breakfast and, naturally, I spent the night. Before arriving there, I had stopped in the more famous town of Sainte-Mère-Église and visited its Airborne Museum. In the guestbook, a 15-year-old schoolboy named Benoît had written: “We must attempt, with these relics of the slow reconquest of liberty, to perpetuate the memory of that which no one has the right to forget.”
Eight people came to Books & Books in the Grove last night to hear my conversation with the traveler and publisher Hilary Bradt. Admittedly, we had stiff competition: Sebastian Junger was over at the Gables store. But Hilary, a charming octogenarian, has also had an adventurous life, one that his included hitchhiking – as she told the audience – in every decade except the first. Her article about her most recent experience, in Germany, appeared in the Guardian.
After the event, over bowls of French onion soup at Le Bouchon, I told Hilary that travel writing is not as popular in the U.S. as it is in Britain. And not just Britain. She said she did an event in Belgium that 60 people attended. And 40 of them bought her book, which of course is written in a language not native to the country.