I know it’s fashionable to make fun of Cracker Barrel, but if you’re a celiac – or traveling with one – it’s about the only place at an interstate exit to get a gluten-free meal.
Until last night's Emmy Awards show - specifically Hannah Einbinder's acceptance speech - I had never heard anyone express support for Palestine and the Philadelphia Eagles in the same sentence.
I went to Bascom Palmer Eye Institute yesterday for my semi-annual checkup. I always make my appointments on Thursdays, so I can have lunch at the weekly farmers’ market that sets up on one of the campus walkways.
Yesterday, I took my bibimbap, and Hania carried her Argentinian kebab, to the courtyard, where we asked two young men in scrubs if we could join them. They were surgical residents, we quickly learned, and enjoyed the market as much as we did. I told them that my bibimbap was delicious, but that the stall had no chopsticks, only forks.
“I’ll get you some chopsticks,” the one resident said, and immediately got up from the table – he had finished his lunch – and went off into the crowd. He returned a couple minutes later with a pair of wooden chopsticks.
Heading to Bascom Palmer, we followed a shady sidewalk that I thought might lead to the outdoor terrace. A young man in a white coat exited the gate, which immediately locked shut. “Too bad we weren’t a little quicker,” I said to Hania, and, as soon as I finished the sentence, the man returned, swiped his badge, and unlocked the gate for us.
We had lunch last week with friends who recently returned from vacation in Poland. Both were born in China and have lived in the U.S. for many years; in their retirement, they have become avid travelers.
In Poland, they were surprised by the scarcity of Chinese tourists. In their previous travels – to Switzerland, Italy, even Hungary and Czechia – they had found busloads of people speaking Mandarin.
Then they thought about the places they had gone in Poland. In Warsaw, they had visited the Warsaw Uprising museum – on the 81st anniversary of its start, when thousands of Varsovians took to the streets to commemorate the ill-fated revolt against the Nazi occupiers. In Gdansk, they had spent time at the Solidarity museum, dedicated to the free trade union that was born in August 1980 as a challenge to the communist government and that led, eventually, to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. Qian pointed out that June 4, 1989 – the date of the first free elections in Poland since prewar independence– is also the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There were no Chinese tour groups in Poland, she decided, because their government didn’t want them getting any ideas.
It was interesting seeing the Polish deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski on CNN this morning, having just seen him last week in Miami addressing a small group of Poles living in South Florida. That meeting, though it included discussions of Ukraine and the current state of Poland, was casual and upbeat; at the conclusion, after posing for a group photo, Sikorski urged everyone to teach their children Polish. Speaking with Wolf Blitzer this morning, he noted that, after 500 years of history with Russia, Poles have learned to take signs of aggression from the east seriously.
In travel I’m a fan of the unsung, and in sports I tend to support the underdog, so I was rooting for the Bills even before I went to Buffalo this past spring, where I visited the landmark City Hall and found a “Go Bills” sign stuck to a window – four months before the start of the season.
Easter Sunday I attended mass at St. Casimir’s Church. The priest, a large man in flowing robes, slowly made his way up the steps of the pulpit to give the sermon. As he took his position before the standing congregation, my eyes moved from his white goatee to his imposing form to the banner unfurled on the pulpit below him: “Christ Is Risen.” A spotlight illuminated the words and also the letters on the back of the blue jacket worn by the boy in the front pew: BILLS.
I hope his parents allowed him to stay up and watch the end of Sunday night's game.