Travel Broadens My Outlook...and My Waistline
On the road, I am prey to the sin of gluttony. Something about being away from home makes me forget all the work I've done to remain healthy. At a drive-thru window, water seems unnatural, and I order a soda. In a sit-down restaurant the choices laid before me, all the pretty pictures and well-chosen words, call for meals drowned in cheese, sour cream, or guacamole. I know I'll be working for weeks to get rid of the extra pounds of a few days.
On the plus side, travel reminds us what great people are out there to write about. Good or bad, friendly or irritating, people met in ymy travels become fodder for a book. I don't know them, so it doesn't even make me feel guilty to stick them into a story and expose their oddities to the world.
Some make me laugh or shake my head, like the woman I met this weekend who often spoke with her hand on her head, backward, spread out like a cap, and held there as if to remind her brain to think. And believe me, it needed reminding.
Some are just asking to become the bad guy/girl in a book: snide, superior, and pompous. Any reader would cheer as they are led off to jail. Maybe even thrown off a cliff. The great thing about mystery writing is you can punish your enemies vicariously, and they never even know it happened.
And there are things you see on the road that you wouldn't see at home. Now O. Henry claimed in "A Municipal Report" that the same good and evil events happen all over the world, that the cruelty of man to man is simply a matter of geography. I would never argue with the master, but I think you have to travel sometimes to see things in a new light or to at least get a fresh outlook.
Driving on US 2, miles from any town, I saw a man of about twenty-five walking down the road on stilts. He was alone, he was focused on his task and not on getting my attention, and he was making pretty good time. Now there's something I saw in my travels that made me wonder, "What is his story?" And of course the next thought is, "Could that story become part of one of mine?"
On the plus side, travel reminds us what great people are out there to write about. Good or bad, friendly or irritating, people met in ymy travels become fodder for a book. I don't know them, so it doesn't even make me feel guilty to stick them into a story and expose their oddities to the world.
Some make me laugh or shake my head, like the woman I met this weekend who often spoke with her hand on her head, backward, spread out like a cap, and held there as if to remind her brain to think. And believe me, it needed reminding.
Some are just asking to become the bad guy/girl in a book: snide, superior, and pompous. Any reader would cheer as they are led off to jail. Maybe even thrown off a cliff. The great thing about mystery writing is you can punish your enemies vicariously, and they never even know it happened.
And there are things you see on the road that you wouldn't see at home. Now O. Henry claimed in "A Municipal Report" that the same good and evil events happen all over the world, that the cruelty of man to man is simply a matter of geography. I would never argue with the master, but I think you have to travel sometimes to see things in a new light or to at least get a fresh outlook.
Driving on US 2, miles from any town, I saw a man of about twenty-five walking down the road on stilts. He was alone, he was focused on his task and not on getting my attention, and he was making pretty good time. Now there's something I saw in my travels that made me wonder, "What is his story?" And of course the next thought is, "Could that story become part of one of mine?"
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