I’ve put a couple of delicious mantous in my bag for us to eat on the plane. Hopefully the nosy little airport beagle that checks carry-on bags won’t notice.

I’m a third-of-the-way through Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and absolutely enjoying it so I’ll be finishing that during the plane ride. A good book, a gigantic batch of photos to look through, and the season finale of Heroes should be enough to keep me entertained for the next fifteen hours.

There are still many more places to visit and things to see which we’ll have to save for our next trip.  For now, it’s time to head back across the ocean to our home in Brooklyn where a big pile of mail and some very thirsty houseplants await us.

From The Stories of Mary Gordon, pg. 42:  “She reached into the tapestry bag at her feet and shyly handed Lorna a box wrapped in violet paper with a teal ribbon. “This is your survival kit for the airplane,” she said. Lorna opened the box; there was an inflatable neck pillow, a set of earplugs, a lavendar sachet that you wear over your eyes like a mask-sized pillow — it was supposed to induce a gentle sleep. There were Victorian tins of pastilles: one black currant, one lemon, with pictures of little girls holding parasols.”

Nothing quite as fancy for us, but we’ve got our stockpile of books (me: Black Swan Green, The Accidental, and The Kite Runner; Shawn: The Adventures of Augie March), our notebooks and pens, a couple of pashminas (I really don’t like airplane blankets, they feel so unclean!), and our waterproof Muji travel bag with a pair of toothbrushes, contact lens cases, and a ziploc bag (yes, we obediently follow airplane safety procedures) for little bottles of lotion. Now all we need are a few not-too-cheesey movies and somewhat edible food.

And on that note, we’re off ~ across the Pacific we go!

I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. If you’re looking for a book to read while you’re sunbathing (when spring eventually warms into summer), this might not be the one to choose. McCarthy paints a bleak story of future America, ravaged to the core by a combination of human destruction and an unmentioned environmental disaster. It’s something on the lines of Farenheit 451 mixed with the futility of human effort in The Grapes of Wrath, set in the context of a much simpler straightforward storyline and riveted with far more horrific imagery.

“He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasnt sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track curved away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all of eternity and that no train would ever run again. Can we go, Papa? Yes. Of course we can.” (pg. 180)

I can clearly see why this book is being championed amonst literary moguls (and why Oprah has decided to crown it with one of her shiny round stickers of approval). It’s laden with layers of symbolism and imagery, intricately woven into the sparse and frightening (think: roasted babies) wasteland that the characters are walking through. There are meanings and emotions at each turn of the road, the fading memories of a past world (our current one) in each abandoned house.  

Despite the accolades this book is receiving, I won’t be keeping it on my bookshelf. It it a good read, but beyond that, I found myself emotionally detached from the characters and their plight ~ call me heartless! Their journey through the American wasteland was a bit too tortured and prolonged, and I did not appreciate the bittersweet ending, that didn’t seem to me a good way to resolve the irrevocable path to death that McCarthy had spent 280 pages creating. Perhaps if I read this book again a few years from now, when it’s my turn to be a parent, I’ll feel much more emotionally affected by it. But for now, I’m ready to put it aside and move on to another.