Traveling lighter

A Peter Max stamp

After last fall’s peripatetic teaching adventure, I was happy to be planted firmly in one place for the last two months.  Now I’m back on an airplane again, somewhere between Philadelphia and Atlanta.  I parked in the garage at the airport, grabbed my bag and kept thinking, “what am I forgetting?” Finally, settled back in the same gate area where I’d waited to board with my students for the long trip to Japan last fall I figured it out. I was missing 15 students and 2 colleagues.  Ah.

I pulled my little writing journal out of my bag to jot a note on the train from the airport to the city and enjoyed browsing the pages from the fall.  Why didn't I ever write about the little ones going to school in Osaka, each with a numbered pinney and jaunty cap, many balanced precariously on their parent's bike?  Or my realization that the Google doodles were a bit like an ordo, marking off the feasts of the saints and blesseds of the secular world?

I enjoyed the graffitti on the freight train going past (what I pulled the journal out to jot down).  Some of it reminded me of Peter Max's art, and I would have been happy to have it cheering up a wall at my house.