Sleeping at the Starlite Motel - and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home

Informationen zum Autor Bailey White  is the author of the national bestsellers  Mama Makes Up Her Mind  and  Sleeping at the Starlite Motel.  She is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio's  All Things Considered. Klappentext Anyone who has read her bestseller Mama Makes Up Her Mind --or who has heard her on National Public Radio--knows that Bailey White is one of the keenest observers of Southern eccentricity since Mark Twain. Sleeping at the Starlite Motel revives White's reputation as a master storyteller, Southern division, as it catalogs the oddities of the Georgia town she knows so well. Leseprobe CIVILIZED FRIENDS ONE OF MY DEAREST CHILDHOOD FRIENDS HAS lived for the past twenty-five years in Paris, where she teaches English to French people. I see Alma only once a year, when she comes home to visit her family for a couple of weeks. She calls me up when she gets here, and I go over to her mother's house in the afternoon, and we sit in the living room and drink tea. Sometimes I try to talk Alma into doing some of the things I enjoy-swimming in the deep springs and sinkholes in north Florida, or just taking a long walk in the woods in the late afternoon. But Alma says that something about living in Paris for so many years has caused her to develop an irrational fear of the natural world. "But it's not like we're in the wilds of Borneo," I tell her. "What exactly are you afraid of?" I'm thinking if I can comfort her with a few reassuring facts, she will lose her fears. Alma says, "I'm afraid an insect will bite me, or I'll fall over or be scratched by a tree." "Well, Alma," I say, "have another cup of tea." On other visits, Alma tries to talk me into coming to see her in Paris. She describes her fascinating cosmopolitan friends, and peculiar little museums she knows about, and wonderful cheeses. But I tell Alma I just can't get up my nerve to go there. "What exactly are you afraid of?" she asks me. And I say, "I'm afraid I will find myself abandoned in the middle of a busy intersection, and I will stand there and stand there, trying to find the courage to cross the street, and cars will whizz by in five or six directions, and their drivers will blow their horns and shout at me in a language I do not speak. And eventually I will wither up and be blown away like a piece of ash and lost in the gray shadows of a great city far from home." Alma thinks for a while. "Have another cup of tea, Bailey," she says. And in the end I don't really regret that Alma and I can't share the things we each love best. I'm just happy that we are both so civilized we can sustain a friendship for twenty-five years on nothing more than cups of tea and conversation. THE FIRST MEMORY I have in this life is of a blackened and petrified dog, curled up in a glass case in a museum in Pompeii. I remember his humped-up back, his little rat tail, and his amazingly well preserved feet, with the pads and toenails still intact. I do not recall my mother's explanation of the museum exhibits at Pompeii, but it must have been effective, because just as clearly as I remember the physiognomy of that charred dog, I remember comprehending for the first time, gazing through the beveled glass, the meaning of distance and the steady passage of time. Now the things I see when I am far from home sometimes appear as if they are in a display case, like that dog in Pompeii, and once again I feel the charm of distance. At the checkout stand in a sparsely supplied grocery store near Chinle, Arizona, a filthy dirty man in front of me tells me that since he moved to Arizona from Oregon he has developed painful cracks in the tips of his fingers. "It's the dry," he says and holds up a finger. Sure enough there is a deep red crack. But what I notice is that three of the other fingers are missing completely. Just l...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Bailey White
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 02.04.1996
• EAN: 9780679770152
• ISBN: 978-0-679-77015-2
• Pagine: 256
• Dimensioni: 134 mm x 202 mm x 14 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Fumetti, cartoni, humour, satira; Viaggi > Reportage di viaggio, racconti di viaggio > Mondo, Artide, Antartide