Archive for Kenneth Roberts

Baltimore

Posted in Family, Travel with tags , , , , on October 7, 2012 by David McInerny

I don’t find myself often in Baltimore, but I’m often near it, and I suppose this can be said for most cities on the eastern seaboard. Once you land at the BWI airport, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and New York City are all reasonable drives – reasonable at least from a distance standpoint, if not necessarily from one of drive time. And I’m always amazed that while it’s hard for mapmakers to work in the names of all those clustered cities that collectively hold tens of millions of people, you still see so much lush greenery on the East Coast. It’s just not that difficult to imagine the Indian-filled forests of Cooper, Hawthorne and Roberts.

A niece was married yesterday, my sister’s daughter, and the oldest grandbaby of my parents. The bride was effervescent and beautiful, the husband handsome and restless as a trophy buck at dusk during hunting season. It was a small, elegant affair and family reunion of sorts, as weddings and funerals tend to be. It was an uncommonly temperate day for October too, which allowed everyone, save the bride, to walk to the church for the nuptials and back to the house for the reception. My siblings and I stood apart on one side of the house for a long while, like errant high school students sneaking a smoke, laughing ridiculously in the re-telling of stories from our youth that would have bored the bejeezus out of anyone else – so maybe it was good that we spared the others by hiding out.

My wife and I took our 22-year-old daughter who is very good friends with the niece. She had spent this summer in Dublin on an internship without serious incident, so we refrained on this trip, reluctantly and with great effort, from giving her travel reminders and advice. This was to show ourselves that we could allow our children to grow up and spread their wings, etc. Well, she forgot her I.D. and had to take a later flight on the journey out, packed her laptop into her checked baggage and had her screen broken by baggage handlers, and didn’t check in for the overbooked flight home and got the last open seat on the plane. She never panicked or complained, so I guess it could be said she’s learning a few good things about getting from here to there. What my wife and learned watching all this, I haven’t a clue.

The Orioles won a one-game playoff to enter baseball’s post-season the evening we arrived, so the celebratory mood in Baltimore was palpable. The O’s have had a magical season, what with scores of improbable extra inning wins and an invincibility when in the lead after seven innings, so post-season anticipation mixed with a wedding mood made for a weekend well enjoyed. I was glad I remembered to pack my Orioles cap on Friday (just in case), and felt smugly fraudulent as I strolled through BWI today, nodding knowingly at real fans in their O’s gear. Hey, you got to root for somebody when your team finishes eighteen games under .500.

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Resort Town Antiquing

Posted in Travel with tags , , , , , , on June 30, 2012 by David McInerny

I love scrounging through used book stores. My favorite bookstore is in New Orleans; others in Omaha and Sacramento. My newest find is in Philadelphia. I wouldn’t give you the store names any more than a fisherman would reveal his favorite fishing holes! This week I’m at an undisclosed resort town on the Michigan shore, and I spent a good part of the morning in a consignment antique store. These are especially fun, because books are rarely the focus of the individual booths, but some booths will have a nice amount of books. What this usually means is the the seller is looking to move a bunch of old books at a few bucks each.

There were some nice finds. A not-valuable but pretty Gramercy edition of “Romeo and Juliet;” a 1900 first edition “Monsieuer Beaucaire” by Indiana’s own Booth Tarkington, which I’ll send to my sister who collects him, and a 1933 collector’s edition of Kenneth Roberts’ “Arundel,” a French and Indian War saga I read as a youth. What was especially fun was a copy of Jeff Smith’s first cookbook, about whom I wrote a few weeks ago on this blog, wondering if his books could still be found. Thanks, Aunt Diane, for recommending I look in used book stores!

The day didn’t end there. We celebrated my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday this evening, and the dining room had a large shelf of old accounting ledgers adorning one end of the room. Tucked in the middle of these leather-bound tomes was an 1896 copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” which I also wrote about recently. I don’t have this hardback version, so I took it to the front desk and asked if I could buy it. The manager looked at the book, paused, and told me I was the second person recently that offered to buy the book. She decided she should talk to her manager next week, and asked for my email address. I smell a mini-auction in the near offing. Wish me luck!

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