On my flight to Chicago last week I sat next to an older woman whose husband, sitting by the window, kept the shade down the entire flight. This is behavior I fail to understand; even if you’re unmoved by cloud formations, don’t you want to see the moment you “slip the surly bonds of Earth”? Even more vital for me is a view of the landing, knowing when to expect the gratifying jolt of wheels on tarmac. If I had a smaller prostate I would always book a window seat – and keep the shade up the entire flight.
Not this man. He kept working on his crossword as we taxied to the gate, which, at O’Hare, is a considerable journey. We had flown over a thousand miles and he had no interest in seeing what the landscape or weather were like in this new place. Perhaps, I thought, he has an eye condition that makes him sensitive to bright light. But then why would he book a window seat?
Finally, moved by some unprecedented spark of curiosity, he lifted the shade two inches to peer out. I leaned over greedily, demonstrably, to catch a glimpse at the great outdoors before he banned it from sight.
“Do you want him to open the shade?” the woman asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been sitting in a tube for the last three hours.”
He obliged. A few seconds later, we arrived at the gate.
I watched the debate last night while simultaneously reading comments on X. Invariably, liberals praised the moderators – David Muir and Linsey Davis – for doing an excellent job, while conservatives complained that they were clearly biased toward Trump and favoring Harris.
I saw the conservatives’ point. But I also wondered if bias toward Trump is really a bias or simply a healthy human response.
The NFL season has begun. It’s been hard for me to take football seriously after realizing a few years ago that the players are wearing shorts. Take a look: Their pants end above their knees. In the old days, pants came down to above the calf, so that pads could protect the knees. I have no idea when or why that changed.
I was in Chicago on Sunday and the place I ate lunch had numerous TVs tuned to the Bears game. I looked up and saw a man in shorts tackle another man in shorts very close to the line of scrimmage. The man who made the tackle jumped up and, with puffed out chest, ran a few yards into the other team’s backfield, celebrating his accomplishment. And I thought: You just made a tackle, the thing that you are paid to do; why are you demonstrably gloating about it? I don’t get up and run a victory lap around my office every time I write a sentence.
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.
Back in May, the Atlantic published a story by Gary Shteyngart about his experiences on the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world. I read it with interest – 28 years ago I wrote about my week on what was then the largest cruise ship in the world, the Carnival Destiny – and annoyance, in part because a lot of the piece was about the author and his discomfort. This annoyance led me to write an essay looking at writing about cruises over the decades, and how it has become more solipsistic: https://theamericanscholar.org/writer-on-board/
I’ve been dipping into Joan Reardon’s Poet of the Appetites: The Life and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher, specifically the section about her time in Aix-en-Provence. She rented a room in a kind of boarding house where, during the meals, the other women would question her ability to write with any understanding about French cuisine. They called her, derisively, la californienne.