5 posts tagged “road trip”
Why can't airports be as nice as the grand rail terminals still with us?
I love entering the main hall here, with its Deco-era fittings restored and extant. It's hard to imagine, but San Francisco's shabby Trans Bay Terminal was once this appealing.
En route to Los Angeles, Union Station. Seven hours...but cost me only $13.50.
I saw the article on the Prescott Daily Courier Web site a couple months ago.
"It has to be," I thought. "Nobody else is named that."
The man in the photo accompanying the upbeat review of his antique shop was gray-haired, but otherwise unchanged from the last time I saw him, which was around 1981. Yes, it was, it had to be: Mr. Leware, one of my junior high school teachers.
Mr. Leware gained an immense advantage by teaching subjects I was already interested in: English and history. Otherwise, our mutual reminisces would probably only be those of how I looked at my plainest and most embattled by puberty. But fret as I did over my orthodontia and my parents' divorce, I was distracted by completing Mr. Leware's assignments. In his classes I learned how to write a bibliography and to diagram a sentence; for homework I wrote an essay on the Seminole Indians and a pseudo-Gothic horror story, "The Falcon of the Dolmen." To this day I place a hyphen in "co-operate," still hearing him derisively pronounce the non-punctuated alternative as "COOOOO-per-ate."
So I really had to stop by his antique store on my recent trip to town.
There was only an hour or two to spend talking in Mr. Leware's tidy store, where the goods were clean, organized, separated out, like the parts of speech in a diagrammed sentence. There were plenty of things I wanted, but which did I need? And, really, how much shelf space should one give to Tiffany glass or Craftsman studio pottery in earthquake country? But I did find something I wanted very much. I wouldn't leave without it.
Not only did he give me the book outright, but he signed it again.
So now I have the Mr. Leware-approved edition of one of my favorite books. It would be hard for an earthquake to damage it. I don't know where I'd get another if one did.
The north-facing view from the house where I grew up.
Three weeks into my new job, the one with the two-hour commute each way. It's midwinter, so I leave and return home in pitch darkness, which is a mercy in its way, considering how filthy the apartment is now that I'm too preoccupied to clean it (as is, ahem, its other resident). Today, the solstice, I'm starting to understand the excitement pagan Europeans felt at this time of year: the sun will return, pushing aside darkness only a minute or two more each day. The sun is coming back, bringing a minute or two more of illumination that isn't from a Godawful 1000-watt fluorescent light bulb like the ones above my cringing head in my work cubicle.
Tomorrow night I'll be in the Mojave desert. The stars will shine crisply in the cold, dry air: I never minded the dark of night when I lived in the country, and could see the stars and moon. I will be able to watch the sunrise at leisure, rather than in a state of suspension from a commuter train platform. The light will intensify, the hillsides will gather detail, and I'll be able to just watch it all, unperturbed by station announcements or train whistles: watch it all, as long as it lasts-- a minute or two earlier than it was this morning.
