I love driving around Florida in the winter, especially on a weekday, when the feeling of getting way with something is doubled.
Yesterday, Alligator Alley lived up to its name as gators darkened the banks of the canal like slugs. I drove onto the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University and spoke to my friend Lyn's journalism class. The talk went well, I thought, until two students waylaid us on our way to lunch and accused me of an unspecified grammatical mistake. They were, Lyn told me, the campus grammar police. They had only one pair of handcuffs, which they clamped on Lyn's wrists; for my shame they exhumed a black-and-white striped Alcatraz hat and placed it on my head.
The cell sat at the edge of a grassy oval, overlooking a fountained lake. We joined two other lowlifes (i.e., professors) and were kindly given small bags of snacks. Then Lyn's husband Jesse brought us lunch from Taco Bell. Old Johnny Cash songs played from a boom box. We would be incarcerated, I was told, until $75 in bail had been collected - all of it to go to the school's creative writing program.
Students wandered over. "Does this mean we don't have class?" one woman asked hopefully. "I'll get you out," one young man said, "if you give me an A."
We were out in time for Lyn's 3:30 class. (No one ever told me what my infraction had been.) Before I spoke, Lyn talked to the students about their upcoming Grammar Safari to the Outlet Mall.
Still savoring our freedom, Lyn, Jesse and I went to Skip One Seafoods for dinner. It was simple fish house with a painting on the outside wall of two shrimp - one pinching the other's behind - and under it the words: "The Freshest Shrimp in the Business."
Reading the menu, Lyn found an "its" with an unnecessary apostrophe. I tried to calm her, suggesting that, when it comes to restaurants, the worse the grammar the better the food.
Then plates of hush puppies, swordfish bites, grilled dolphin, grilled snapper, cole slaw, potato salad and fried shrimp arrived. I was right.
Last night, flying from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, I did something I hadn't done in a long time: I conducted a lengthy conversation with my seatmate.
She was a 14-year-old Romanian-Canadian coming to Sunny Isles for a month to play tennis. I told her I'd been to her homeland twice, and pulled from my bookbag a postcard of my book. (I usually have it on me when I travel; you never know whom you're going to meet.) Handing it to her, I pointed out the subtitle: "From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler."
"Vlad Dracul," she said, and I told her I'd ignored the Dracula angle completely. I didn't mention that I focused instead on the Hungarian minorities.
She loved Miami, though described the downtown, quite accurately, as "sketchy." She was homeschooling herself online; she had some French homework in her knapsack. But her passion was tennis. She liked Federer and admired Nadal; she thought Djokovic was starting to slip. Her favorite woman player had been Justine Henin.
I told her she'd be here for the Sony Ericsson Open. Her eyes lit up; she thought it was in April. I told her to go early in the tournament, and wander the outside courts. Federer usually practices on one a couple hours before his match.
As the plane started its descent over Davie she looked out at the illuminated flatness, ideal for tennis courts, and said, "Home sweet home."
George Mikes, journalist and travel writer, was born on this day in 1912.
A native of Hungary, Mikes went to England in 1938 (to cover the Munich crisis) and stayed. He specialized in humorous books about countries back before the age of political correctness. But he was never mean, and at his best he was both funny and insightful. "On the Continent, people have good food," he wrote in perhaps his most famous book, How To Be an Alien. "In England they have good table manners." (This was back before the British learned how to cook.)
Little Cabbages begins: "In Hungary I was taught that France was a Great Power; in England I was told that France was a great joke."
Any Souvenirs: Central Europe Revisited , published in 1971, is his most poignant book, beginning with a lament for the vanished culture of the coffee-house, and ending with his expulsion from his native land. This last chapter is titled: "How To Be an Undesirable Alien." As with all great humorists, the light touch overrode personal sorrow and disappointment.
Before we leave Patrick Leigh Fermor, who turned 94 yesterday, a taste of his brilliance:
"The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal - or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube - and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. ...When the children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone - children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs - moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath."
Patrick Leigh Fermor, the greatest living travel writer, turns 94 today.
In 1933, the teenage Leigh Fermor took a boat from England to the Hook of Holland and proceeded to walk to what was then Constantinople. His account of this peregrination takes up two volumes, A Time of Gifts (arguably the greatest travel book title, as well as the greatest travel book) and Between the Woods and the Water (also in contention for best travel book).
Written decades after the fact (with the help of a journal), both books capture - in fervent, erudite, often baroque prose - the grand sweep and the hard-earned joys of travel, as well as a Europe that was soon to disappear forever. The young Englishman was alive to everything: languages, customs, topography, architecture, flora and fauna, history, literature, politics. Planning to travel rough, he made an early connection with some landowners who gave him letters of introduction to use along the route. So when he wasn't bedding down in barns he was sleeping in castles.
Leigh Fermor eventually settled in Greece - disguised as a Cretan shepherd, he captured a German general during World War II - and wrote two excellent books about the country: Mani, where he lived, and Roumeli. His book The Traveller's Tree is probably the best travel book ever written about the Caribbean. He is one of the few travel writers to write both itinerant (traveling through) and sedentary (settling down) travel books.
The account of his youthful walk across Europe is his great, and sadly unfinished, masterpiece. Fans have been waiting patiently for the final volume, which would take him triumphantly into Constantinople, but the fear is that it may never see completion.
Of all the writers I admire, there are only two whom I can reread and feel instantly changed. A few sentences by Nabokov will make me see the world with greater clarity (like getting new glasses), and a paragraph by Leigh Fermor unfailingly heightens my enthusiasm for life's infinite richness.
Elliot Paul, journalist and travel writer, was born today in 1891 in Linden, Massachusetts.
Paul specialized in vanishing worlds. The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, perhaps his most famous book, depicts the inhabitants and customs of Santa Eulalia on the island of Ibiza just before it was changed forever by the Spanish Civil War. The Last Time I Saw Paris is a minutely-observed, poignant portrait of the residents of Rue de la Huchette, in the Latin Quarter, in the days leading up to World War II.
This was decades before Ibiza became party central, Rue de la Huchette became a home for Greek restaurateurs, and the sedentary travel book became a guide to the good life.
Pulling my copy of The Life and Death of a Spanish Town from its shelf last night I found a bookmark from Sessler's Bookshop in Philadelphia - another vanished world - with lines from Ship of Fooles:
Still am I busy,
Bookes assembling,
For to have plentie
It is a pleasaunt thing.
You don't get that with Kindle.