Plane reading

I love preparing for a trip I'm excited about -- packing snacks, digging out old maps and guides, incessantly emailing my friends about plans a week or more in advance. Though I love being somewhere else, I hate flying, so I like to save up my favorite podcasts, or maybe a book I'm really looking forward to reading. Something entertaining, not too heavy, but worth mulling over.

This past weekend I purchased The New Kings of Nonfiction, a collection edited by Ira Glass. I sneaked a peek at it today when I was stuck in a dentist's waiting room for half the morning and so far it has kept its promise to make me almost look forward to sitting around the Jet Blue terminal on Thursday.

Among many activities planned for my trip, I get to watch the second and third episodes of the new season of Mad Men. So much has been written about it that I'm not sure what I can add, even as I become one of the millions of Americans who have started over in New York City during the past two plus centuries, running away from a mess of a life to create something better. Every time I hear the swift *zing* of Don Draper's Zippo flipping open, I think of my grandfather lighting a Lucky Strike.