Playing Through: more than golf

February, 2011

It’s cold and three feet of snow have fallen in the past weeks.  Today it’s ice. Work, schools and roads are closed. Snow days in New England automatically start with staying in bed to read on- beyond the alarm clock.  Winds gust in the early darkness. We’re wide-awake and we have nowhere we need to be so we reach for the Perfect Book: A Window Into Elsewhere. Yesterday I re-read Curtis Gillespie’s Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast, sniffing back cover-to-cover tears even though I think golf is totally lame and it’s a happy book.  The poignantly personal tale of Canadian Gillespie’s year of living in Scotland with his young family in the small East Lothian golf-haven of Gullane is woven into both Gillespie’s journey as a son, father and golfer and a color-filled walk along sandy shores. My own hanky-soaked connection is simply that it is the same small village I grew to love when we lived there for our own year awa’—despite  my adamantly being a non-golfer.

Gillespie chronicles his story through reflections on life- lessons learned from his (recently deceased) father (“a man of wisdom and goodness”) with whom he’d always talked about the “someday” when they’d play these courses together. Not unsurprisingly he is adopted by Jack and Archie, two hugely likeable Gullane locals; aging golfers whose irascible natures lend a buoyant and often hilarious tone to the story as they speak in the kind of leg-pulling code that comes from many years of deep but competitive friendship.

Gillespie has that intuitive ability to use words that transcend his moment and make it ours.  Reading through his eyes brought me back to the sweet crescent of Gullane Beach, to the child-friendly commons of Goose Green, to the winds and the sea and the Firth of Forth, the birds swirling by the links-trail along Aberlady Bay through tenacious buckthorn and grassy dunes, to the bright fire at the pubs whose warmth we sought on many a wild evening and where Gillespie, Jack and Archie relaxed over 19^th hole pints of 80 Schilling Ale.

Turning the last page I startled to see snow blowing across my window and had to do that head shaking reality thing to jump back from Gillespie’s Gullane world into mine.  I have walked around since then hearing words filtered through a gentle East Lothian burr.  I can barely refrain from breaking into a faux Scottish tongue.  I wonder if it will be possible to live “awa’ ’” again for a golden year.

To me this is the epitome of why we read travel stories, even if they involve golf. Someone once coined the phrase “armchair travel” and it clung because it works.  We cruise bookstores and surf the web looking for that perfect story; the one that excites us (“Let’s go there!”), reminds us (“Remember when?”) and offers us immersion into places we will never visit nor do we necessarily want to.  This is passion and we can never get enough.  My bookshelves probably like yours, are heavy with marked-up outdated travel guides and someone else’s stories about where they’ve been, what it was like and why we should want to go there too; books we’ve read once, twice or maybe tomorrow, feeling a curious richness in knowing that they are there, for us, the very next snow day.

Wandering Bookluster—Meg Robbins 2/2011

I am excited to be invited to step in as the new travel book reviewer at Wanderlust and Lipstick.  I, perhaps like you, have a magnetic attraction to that combination of words: Travel and Book which go together like peanut butter and jelly, white sand and blue sky, map and trail, hope and possibility. I’ve been practicing saying my new name: Wandering Booklust, Wandering Booklust, Wandering Booklust three times fast and I’ve almost mastered it without getting it wrapped around my front teeth but I’m pretty sure anyone listening would hear only, “Wandabook,Wandabook, Wandabook.”

Please call me Meg.

What do I bring to the role of Wandabook? Well, I read  travel-related books probably like you –voraciously.  I lust for them. They call me from the aisle of every book store and library, they overflow my bookshelves, they rest at odd angles on my small bedside table, hide under the couch and children’s car seats and make my shoulder bag sag.  Having spent a lifetime consuming travel books I am also a traveler and writer, adding my own words to the toppling piles.  I write a lot about getting lost.

Assuming the mantle of Wandabook (I imagine her costume has a waterproof/windproof cape, a capacious backpack, constantly changing hair hues like Hogwart’s Nymphadora Tonks and a good pair of hiking boots ) is a solemn undertaking.  As Wandering Booklust Reader and Weeder,  I aim to share those books that you and I find tremendously useful and serendipitously delightful. We love them so much that they become well- thumbed  permanent additions to our own tumbling piles of travel books. The ones we don’t love go to stabilizing the sofa’s legs.

Imagine this: Wandering Booklust profiles a gorgeous book, just the one to take with us on our next trip or over to that cozy armchair or warm tub. We read it cover to cover and then slowly go through it again. Maybe we wander back streets of faraway small villages reading it when we stop for a rest, a coffee, a glass of wine, or squint under a starry sky with only a candle or a powermag  super-shine flashlight to see by.

When we’re finished, (really finished) we give it to a friend or a new acquaintance  or leave it opened to page 134 on a park bench for strangers because we want them to have that experience as well. When we get home or weeks pass, we realize that we must have (Must Have!)  our own copy of that lovely book back in our nest and we buy a new one.  This  pristine copy  has no bent pages, no wine stains, no leaves or train ticket stubs tucked in as place holders, no mysterious phone numbers or directions in the margins; it has never been dropped in the bathtub.  We wonder what our old copy’s new readers are making of all that.

Those books are out there now, just waiting for us. Calling all Wandering Booklusters—let’s go!

Nymphadora Tonks courtesy DeviantArt.net

What are you reading? Share it here!

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