She removed her lipstick with a napkin leftover from the morning croissant at a midtown Chock Full O Nuts. No point in attracting unwanted attention as they enter the airport terminal. The hues of redness…crimson, cranberry, scarlet…fade on the crumpled white paper.
How do you plan a trip? Is it a destination toward, a retreat from, or stations of the cross?
The sky drops gusts that chill the skin’s surface, but do you pack swim wear, just in case?
Can you fit your essentials all in one bag, for a sudden escape through the forest as the roadblock approaches?
Travel music. Does the genre follow terrain, Charlie Parker blowing alto sax at the headwaters of the Williams River? Erik Satie piped into a hotel conference room at a quarterly meeting of commercial real estate brokers?
I carry “Gassenhauer” to all my funerals.
Hitchcock made his last black-&-white film, “Psycho,” immeditely following a visually spectacular Technicolor “North by Northwest” that featured the crop-duster plane attack on Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint wearing seamed nylons and heels as they navigated a cliff next to the profile of Washington’s nose while hiding from Martin Landau.
Nowhere on Mount Rushmore did I once see her touch up her lips.
