Packing List

I suppose sensible people count out their underwear and socks first, or charge their phones, or work out their itineraries.  Well, I haven't any itinerary per se.  I go home to Pennsylvania every year, about this time, to see the old people.  Our itinerary runs something like this:

"Where do you want to eat?"

"Up to you."

That goes on for roughly two weeks.

As for clean under-things, I've got plenty.  I'm going to try this trip to pack fewer clothes I'll never wear.  Nix the dress-pants.  Stick to just the one pair of shoes.  I can borrow a tie, come to that, from Dad or my brother if I need one -- though the mind boggles, both at the available selection and just what the occasion might ever prove to be.

Phone, iPad, camera, I've charged them all, but I'll wait to bag the lot on the weekend.  I'll have to renew the service for the iPad I haven't used since the last trip.  (Must remember to do that.)

Two weeks, visiting.  There you have it.

So really, the only pressing question now is what to read while I'm away.  The flight, or flights I should say, will be long and loathsome.  Air-travel nowadays is more akin to confinement than flight.  I always pack a neck-pillow, ear-plugs, and a night-mask.  I buy water and crackers at the airport now, as one must for fear of terrorist hydration schemes.  I play by the rules.  This is not my first trip.  But now, books, books are what matter.  I may buy a magazine or two for the trip, to be left in back-seat-pockets along the way; the New Yorker, usually, and maybe Entertainment Weekly, perhaps the New York Review of Books.  And for books?  Here's what I have so far.

First, my old, EBM edition of Cowper's Letters. Though I have the complete edition in four volumes, hardcover, I thought I'd take this ugly old darling along so as to mark up passages for my Cowper reading in October.  With a better edition at home, this one can now be a working copy.  No shame in annotating that.

So far, just the one Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse, though I hope to find at least one other, unfamiliar title to take with me as well.  No shame in admitting, I usually can manage at least two or more of these each trip, if I manage nothing else.  The airports alone may be enough to polish one off, or certainly on the planes.  (We'll see if I can sleep at all.  I usually can't, now they've made the seats the size of postages stamps and as comfortable as bleacher-seats at a ballgame.)  Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll find a nice Ngaio Marsh as well yet.

The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot was an impulse.  I always take some poetry, for bedtime reading, and I've been lucky in finding nice old, paperback anthologies before, full of things I'd never read.  When I saw this slim volume though, some instinct told me the time had come to give the old boy another go.  It's been years.  Why not?  When I opened it, I happened on "We are the hollow men" and thought, "perhaps we are, indeed."  Not exactly traditional vacation reading, but then what other than the thrillers ever qualifies as such on my list?  Done.

For reliable pleasure of a more familiar kind, this charmingly dowdy Modern Library edition from the 1930s of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians came across the Used Books Desk.  As it was the right size for packing, and a book I loved, I thought it fit the bill rather better than last year's selection in this category, Thomas Carlyle's The Life of John Sterling.  Oh dear.  Oh dear.  Let this be a warning to you all.  I was deep in Carlyle last Fall, but that proved to be not nearly such a good excuse as it seemed at the time for putting Carlyle in my bag.  I read it.  It was... remarkable.  'nough said.

And finally -- so far -- and most unlikely of the litter, a friend at work gave me a copy of William Goldman's The Princess Bride.  I am too old to remember the movie as much of anything, though I've noticed that with lots of people younger than myself that film has become a touchstone of childhood.  They quote it all the time; in conversation, on social media, etc.  To me, Mandy Patinkin is Che, or Georges Seurat, rather than "Inigo Montoya."  I remember the movie as amusing, but nothing more.  Well, my young friend is of a different generation and a fan of William Goldman's novel, which I've never read.  He bought me a copy when I told him this.  Very sweet.  I was skeptical that I would ever read it, but I took it to lunch one day, read the first chapter and found it charming.  Into the bag it goes then!  (I have read with pleasure Goldman's memoirs of screenwriting in Hollywood.  I remember them as quite funny.  So, it would seem, is this, his most beloved book.  I now have high hopes.)

And that's it, so far.

This may not be a final list.  I may yet find other things I'd rather.  And then there is the unhappy problem of having no access to a bookstore while I'm back in PA, unless by some miracle I manage a trip to Pittsburgh this time.  I have an old friend there who runs a grand, used bookstore of national reputation.  I keep meaning to go.  I keep not managing to get away for the day.  Not the point of the trip, of course, come to that.  I don't get back but once a year.  It's not enough.  I miss the old folks.  It's them I go to see.

Still, when the last buffet is closed out and the last snack consumed before bed, I will need something with which to fill my head, something other than regret, memories and missing my beloved husband, A., back here in my real home.

I believe I may need another book.  Or two.