Last week at my event at Books & Books in Coral Gables, during the Q&A, I got the most unexpected question I’d ever been asked. It was from my friend Javier. “I know you like Portugal a lot,” he said, “so what do you think of Fernando Pessoa’s comment that he hated to travel?”
After laughing loudly, I said that Pessoa was such an iconoclast, and fixture of Lisbon, that it was perfectly understandable.
In 2011, I got a gig covering the U.S. Open for a now defunct online tennis magazine. The experience was so wonderful – choice seats, daily happy hour (free Honey Deuces), player interviews (Andrea Petkovic!) – that it spoiled me for attending the tournament as a regular spectator. This year, with players complaining about disruptions from influencers, the abuse of hecklers, the smell of weed, I’m glad I went, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “when the going was good.”
We were driving along listening to one of the Water Music suites when Hania the celiac looked down at the Sirius XM screen, which gave the composer’s name with the first two initials. Then she said, “Gluten Free Handel.”
I’ve learned over the years that people who say they’ll come to your talk often change their minds, while people who say they can’t make it, never do. Still, I was touched by the friends who did show up, and the people who came out of an interest in Poland, or travel writing, or a lack of anything better to do.
I’ll be at Books & Books in Coral Gables tonight talking about my memoir with Carlos Frías. When I scheduled the event back in the spring, I was pretty sure we’d have a hurricane on Sept. 2. Instead, the weather looks pretty good and, since it’s a conversation, I don’t have to do any preparing.
Eighty-seven years ago today, Germany invaded Poland, an act of aggression that signaled the start of World War II. When I lived in Warsaw in the early ’80s, I’d walk every morning down Opaczewska Street to Grójecka Street to catch a bus or tram. I didn’t know then of the intersection’s significance, but, visiting the old neighborhood a few years ago, I found a monument commemorating the soldiers and brave citizens who gathered there the first week of September 1939 and tried to stop the invading German army. It had been erected after the end of Soviet domination in 1989.