First Word: Danette Beavers: Trip

A trip for me is hours sitting with my knees up around my chest, smelling other people’s farts and stinking feet, eating plastic food and suffering my own nervous stomach. Where have I ever been that was a true delight, a real pampering: at my leisure in the Bahamas, the Greek Isles or Tuscany? Why have I never eyed a cabana boy in Hawaii as he brings me an umbrella drink and escorts me to the spa where some equally luscious demonstration rubs me all over with hot oil? Why not then gone to a dinner where the food is so unbearably good that I want to cry—foods light and interesting, textures surprising—nothing at all like the foods I eat when I come back from a trip to the supermarket.