September 1st marked the 85th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland that began World War II. I was in Warsaw on August 1st, when the city commemorated the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising. The Old Town was alive with musicians singing old war songs and actors reenacting street battles. At five o’clock, the official start time of the uprising, a huge crowd filled the square in front of the Royal Castle. After a moment of silence, sirens wailed and flares were lit. Then everyone sang the national anthem: “Poland is not yet lost,” it begins, “as long as we are living.”
There is a moment in Jonathan Raban’s memoir Father and Son – which describes his recovery from a stroke – in which his physical therapist announces that she’s going on a cruise. Ever the literary man, Raban gives her David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” somehow not realizing that it is like giving Deliverance to someone planning a camping trip.
Shelby Rogers played her last U.S. Open match last night, losing to Jessica Pegula 4-6, 3-6. She became one of my favorite players a few years ago at the Open when she beat then #1 Ash Barty and in the post-match interview was asked how she had done it. She said something about taking it point by point and then apologized, saying “That’s such a cliché.”
About a year later I was sitting in the lobby of the Warsaw Marriott, waiting to meet someone, and I noticed a blond woman with a tennis bag over her shoulder checking in. As she headed to the elevator, I noticed it was Shelby Rogers. I followed her and introduced myself, and then told her how impressed I had been by her sensitivity to language. I explained that I was writer. I asked her what she was doing in Warsaw, and she said she was on her way to a tournament in Latvia, and that her coach was Polish. I told her my wife was Polish (so we sort of had something in common). Then I let her get on her elevator.
In a year when the Miami Marlins are bad and the Tampa Bay Rays mediocre, it was a thrill to see the boys of Lake Mary come from behind yesterday and defeat Chinese Taipei in the Little League World Series. They became the first Florida team in history to claim the title of Little League champions.
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.
Catching up on my reading, I came across Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker of Kevin Costner’s new western Horizon: An American Saga, and was struck by the critic’s description of one of the characters as a “sex worker.” It made me wonder if the saloon had a mixologist.