Recent Musings. . .

Trunks – the mark of a serious traveler. I have always been seduced by trunks, mangled, stickered, old fashioned trunks. The kind your jet-setting grandparents took on the Titanic. Or the toy kind – I myself have an antique Buck Rogers trunk I store all my old papers from grad school in (somehow that seems fitting to me…) I once visited Paul Bowles in Tangier (with whom I had the most magical correspondence for years before he invited me over) and he had the most amazing array of trunks stacked up by the front door. I asked him about them, where he’d gotten them, where he’d gone. He replied that a really good traveler never buys a trunk, he finds one that has already been seasoned by other travelers. One of them he’d found in Ceylon, sticking half out of the ground and filled with blocks of tea. He coopted it immediately and used it to rest his feet on. Now that’s style, I said, until he corrected me and said, no, that’s practical.  Only the truly whimsical can make the extraordinary ordinary.