Who’s up for a solo trip to an exotic city or two?
Stephanie Rosenbloom celebrates the ticket-for-one idea in her book, Alone Time, in which she visits four cities in four seasons. No husband. No girlfriends. No tour bus.
It’s all to “savor” the experience, which Rosenbloom claims, can be done better without the distraction of companions.
So we, the readers follow along, as she savors her four cities — Paris, Istanbul, Florence and New York — getting the moments down on paper. She treks to museums, cafes, cemeteries, Turkish baths. She quotes scholars and psychologists on the experience of savoring: how to do it, how to dine alone, whether taking pictures counts as “savoring.”
As for New York, it is Rosenbloom’s home city. Like anything familiar, we no longer notice the grandest house in town, the cutest cafe, the most fetching park. So Rosenbloom sets about seeing her city anew.
To read about Rosenbloom’s richly-recorded trips is to both envy the lovely moments — art gazed upon, bridges paused upon, pastries nibbled at leisure — and to grow irritated at all the place-name dropping. And anybody who visits Paris had better savor the place, although when I went, the weather was nasty and the guy in the train station was belligerent. I’d like a do-over, please, and let’s make it in the month of April, OK?
Actually, reading Rosenbloom is good for the soul. I’m real short on savoring, of late. I’ve actually envied the dead on a few days. But there’s always that final scene in the play, Our Town, that makes me try a little harder.
So let’s you and I get right to it. I’ll just look out the window here and savor the dog-walking jogger, the children down the street riding the go-carty thing, the birds bursting out of the trees, the pilled sleeves of my sweater (things don’t have to be pretty to get noticed; we’re not in Paris yet, but we’re practicing for when we go).
Next: gonna go savor some dinner.
Graphic created on Snappa.com
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