Travel Writing

I've been writing again, even snippets here and there if I'm traveling or just busy. And busy I am, with an impending move into a new apartment and impending hellacious travel schedule. But all things will settle with the cool hands of autumn.

I was poking through my Treo recently and found a few descriptive notes I jotted down in various airports. People watching has become a fun new habit while I'm by myself. Boy, do I enjoy sitting alone with my iPod and watching people walk around, snipe at each other, hug, kiss, avoid, look awkward, stuff bad food in their mouth, look rumpled and exhausted, losing their patience, holding on to their patience. I get to be a participating observer. You'd think with my Irish and Italian blood I'd be aggravated and fuming all the time at the long bouts of waiting, but I seem to find it interesting.

While I'm watching this life happen around me, the writer in me is stimulated, waking up from her daytime sleep. I start seeing phrases forming around people as they breathe in and out, as they exist in front of me. My palms itch to curve over a keyboard, to stare at a blank screen of unwritten possibility...so in the event I am unable to drag out the laptop, I write the following tidbits on my Treo notepad:

The smell of the jetway reminds me of the gasoline-and-generator smell of crude, small-town carnivals.

The man's deep-set eyes are framed by querying eyebrows, drawn perpetually together and upwards as if earnestly perplexed and dismayed. He looks like a puppy hearing "No" for the second time.

This old guy is shuffling along the aisle, stooped and genial. His thin neck pokes out of his humped collar like a happy, but tickled, geratric turtle. His wife is taller than he by a good half a foot, all elegant angles and silver grace. They must be foreign, they look way too contented for the States. (turns out they were German)

I have no clue what I'm going to do with these, but I like the exercise of describing people.