endless travels

I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly busy these days. I’m measuring time by the number of words I’m writing, the number of interviews I’m finished with, the amount of lists of contacts and places I need to go piled about me on slips of grid paper. Last night, I swam in all these tasks, dreaming a jumbled mess of colors and — most of all — nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Sometimes I wish my thoughts came in pictures. You may be one of those people I envy, those highly visual people who find pattern and color and contrast in everything. I find myself looking for words – reading signs, looking at the combinations of consonants and vowels. My photos are frequently filled with them. But sometimes you just can’t help it. The words jump out at you, like they did over my trip to Boston.

I mean, just look at this. Dr. Paul! You are amazing! Stars and eyes, flourishes and block print. I can’t beat it if I tried.

And I wish every single neighborhood had a corner store whose windows were covered in signs like this (and had the same three guys standing out front cat-calling the group of teenage girls flirting with them across the street). I managed to snap a few photos of some of the most creative signage I’ve seen. Read the fine print, people.

If you’re tongue-tied, here’s what to say:

A play about the 2004 World Series, all on this poster (larger version here):

And if you’re a table-tennis champion without your equipment, here’s where to go. Just don’t speak French:

Artful, comedic, philosophical. And the ones that deserve to be carved in stone. I loved them all. Do you?

There is a time when I travel, an unexpected moment, where I find myself soaked in the place where I’m standing. Most times, it’s a singular experience, I’ve found, the one hour or minute or even second where I feel connected to the place I’ve flown to, driven to or walked to. Sometimes it happens in familiar touristy spot, like walking across Prague’s Charles Bridge at night in the rain, huddled under an umbrella to find a stand to buy hot mulled wine. Other times, I don’t know it’s coming, like when we sat at the restaurant counter in Barcelona, talking to the owner and eating whatever he brings to us – tiny dishes of unnamable (to us) ingredients; when gondoliero (this isn’t him or his boat, but it’s a beautiful photograph) and his architect friend laughed and talked with us in a dark, subterranean restaurant in Venice, as I downed the best filet mignon ever and drank all the limoncellos they buy me; when the beautiful five-year-old girl at a restaurant in Curacao who, after dancing around the floor with her mother, climbed to our table to talk about SpongeBob SquarePants.

When I’m in these moments, I feel this soaring joy at being alive. I know it’s a sentimental thought, but I love it then.

When I was in Boston recently (which was, by the way, filled with these moments!), we wandered around the streets of Arlington on Halloween night. Little Tairou was dressed as a lion and my friends Melody and Josh pulled him along in the dark as he sat in the back of a red wagon and we tried to coax him to say “trick or treat” to perfect strangers. Early in the night, we turned a corner and saw a group of people gathered at one side of the street, so we all wandered over there, too.  A tall, muscled, red-haired, pony-tailed guy was bent over a set of tables erected on the side of his yard. A small desk lamp was propped on a music player, sending beams of light onto tubs of hot dogs and vats of chili. When he saw us, he sang out a big hello and he started dishing out bowls of chili for us, telling us he’d won awards for his slow-cook chili.

We stood around on the sidewalk, balancing bowls of warm, tomato-y chili in our hands, as he told us about growing up in this house, in this neighborhood. Every Halloween, he tries to cook something for people in the neighborhood. He and I started talking about barbecue — he’s getting a smoker built, he said — and when he told us he a musician, he ran inside to get us some CDs of his band, the Dave Sammarco Band. When I asked if I could take his picture, he said, “Hold on, let me get my glasses on.”

I could have stayed there all night talking with him about living in Arlington and his band and his burgeoning catering business. But we slid on down the sidewalk to gather more candy and head to a nearby Korean restaurant. It was the perfect night, the perfect Boston moment. Do you have these moments, too?

I’m visiting one of my best friends. And since we’re in Massachusetts, of course a staked witchy, jack-o-lantern would be one of the first things I see.