For me, being sick on the road is unspeakably frustrating—especially when I’m in an unfamiliar city that I want to explore. As I mentioned on Friday, I spent the weekend in Tucson, Arizona, and though I longed to hop in my rental car and check the place out, I chose instead to play it smart and stuck close to my hotel room, devoting Saturday morning to writing my Wall Street Journal review of Driving Miss Daisy and going out only to deliver two speeches (both of which seemed to go well) and see the play that I’d come to town to review. I did manage, however, to eat a meal at El Charro, one of the restaurants to which I’d been steered by aficionados of Mexican cuisine, and so I can say that the carne seca is every bit as good as its reputation. Otherwise, I mostly saw Tucson from my eleventh-floor window, a view that made me want very much to come back and stay a little longer.
Alas, I would have had to leave on Sunday even if I’d been at my picture-perfect best, for the off-Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America opens this week, and the only evenings on which I could catch preview performances of the two installments were tonight and Tuesday. So I flew back to New York with a good deal of reluctance, still sniffling and coughing but feeling a bit better, if by no means completely well.
I know myself, and one of the things I know is that I have a pronounced tendency to respond to signs of recovery from an illness by stepping hard on the gas pedal of my life instead of giving myself a chance to shake the bug off completely. My goal for the coming week is to keep on playing it smart instead of working myself into a relapse. Let’s see how I do!
Archives for October 25, 2010
TT: Almanac
“I was brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have never learned the art of discontent.”
John Buchan, Pilgrim’s Way: An Essay in Recollection