This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
You can get saddle-stitched issues that are now longer printed
by requesting a reproduction of the issue for amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.
What’s the one thing I never leave home without? No, it’s not the obvious, tooth brush, razor, etc. Though you’d sometimes wonder from the way I look while on the road, dishevelled, a three day shadow.
Or the given; clean underwear. Once it might’ve been the trusty Smith Corona word processor, you know the device, a hybrid between typewriter and computer.
Despite the fact the little circular table beneath the hanging lamp in most motel rooms was never near enough an outlet to plug it in. So now, I carry my version of Mark Twain’s lap desk. Though not as ornate as his cherry wood and polished brass fittings with a fold-up felt writing surface.
Like him, I recline in the act, get up under the bedside light and while away the hours. We haven’t journeyed to exotic locales but we have wandered widely, up to Quebec, southwest to Kansas, as far south and west as San Antonio one spring.
Everywhere I go, a zippered nylon binder, large enough to carry a couple paperbacks besides the blank sheets of paper and an electronic thesaurus, tags along.
Maybe my travelogues will never be as popular as Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” or Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie”. Still, if as the saying goes, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, so too passage without a succinctly detailed record to remember it by later, just wouldn’t be the same.
