Now Boarding

Bird by Bird was my flight book and I needed a day or two to think through it before picking up something new.  (I thoroughly enjoyed this read.)

So then Pulitzer-Prize-winning Less by Andrew Sean Greer became my weekend book, and in following his round-the-world trip to avoid a wedding, I could not help remembering my decade old round-the-world trip and how it did (and did not) relate to love.

I flew from Nashville to Houston to Tokyo to Singapore to Shanghai to Beijing to Bangkok to London to home.

Arthur Less heads from San Francisco to New York to Mexico City to Turin to Berlin to Morocco to India to Japan to home.

I smiled at anecdotes that rang so true like clapping on an arriving flight (which I did last Wednesday finally dropping my resistance to this quirky travel habit). “Less German” left me laughing aloud in several places and I could not help but to sigh with his few hours in Paris and missed love while enthusiastically shouting “yes!” in identifying with the VAT form. (I think I’ve only once or twice been able to manage this refund in two decades of overseas travel.) I also enjoyed having to pick up a dictionary for a word or two while reading.  [Also true was the impulsive overseas clothing purchases... but I happen to think that flowy pieces from a Florence, Italy summer collection were quite apt for the Alabama heat.]

It is interesting how our travels inform us, challenge us, change us and yet also, how in some ways we stay the same precisely due to some of these experiences abroad.  We follow Less but I followed me too.

Singapore, 2007
Shortly after taking this photo, the table beside
me at dinner would catch on fire.