a snail book club for slow readers sounding out words

On the plane I read. In the terminal I read when I'm not feeling compelled to purchase coffee with a silly name, or Dwell. Strange that flying makes me feel pulled down into someplace underground with just the words of the book, cocooned. The rapid travel slows me down. Wedged in the middle seat between the very tall all-knees young man with the sushi take-out and the chunky pastor who took off his shoes, put in earplugs, and donned a sleep mask, I feel isolated, adrift, pulled only down by the smelly socks and the chirp of the seat-belt sign. My mental fog lasts for days after the trip ends. My body lacks its normal skeleton, its framework for operations. I am more lava lamp than Erector Set.

Where do we dwell? In our body? In our mind? Do the rooms within our shell spiral away from the entrance into a coil of tiny closets?

What slime trail aids our travel? How do we choose whether to search for space in the overhead bin and boost our luggage up, or to check it for free at the gate?

Crisscrossing time zones how do we figure out which when we are in where? Someone, maybe my daughter-in-law's mother, suggested I read Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. How fitting in this month of remembering my parents' declines to read this memoir of a bedridden patient observing the unbustling, crawling, gliding life of a terrestrial mollusk!

Oak Point July 3, 2014

Oak Point June 15, 2014

 

Heard Museum July 2010