Traveling

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This will be brief because I'm on the road again.  Specifically, I'm in Kansas City for ConQuest. And just right now I'm weary as weary, because it's been a long day.

The whole jet-plane-delay-transfer-drag-your-bags-to-the-far-side-of-the-airport-and-wait thing can get pretty old pretty fast.  But still.  Travel . . .

I think of when I was in Yekaterinburg and went to see Russian SF writer Gennady Praskevich off at the train station.  Gennady only has twenty or so words of English, but he can crack me up with only one.  The day before we were sitting with friends in a park and a band was playing.  He turned to me and with a deadpan face said, "Dance?"  A little later he had two young children in stitches by standing at the edge of a goldfish pond and solemnly feeding the fish small coins.  Now he was going all the way across Siberia to his home on the Pacific coast.  He paused as he was climbing onto the train and extended a hand to me.  "Come," he said.

And, oh, how my heart soared!  I didn't speak Russian and I had return tickets to the States, but if it hadn't been for Marianne and Sean waiting for me back home, I swear I would have climbed on board and disappeared into Siberia forever.


Above:  Kansas City at night.  Sleep tight, all.

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