Vicarious travel

On Saturday I spent much of the day in the Hopkins library, while L. took Cleo, a friend, and the friend's toddler to a sprawling orchard, where they went on a couple of hay rides, raced toy boats, and picked out Halloween pumpkins. When we met up at 4, they were clearly buoyed by a day in the fall sun, and L. spoke happily of live music and a petting zoo. Having spent my own time simply reading, I struggled slightly to imagine the scene - until L. revealed a camera full of autumnal pictures, and until I saw the back seat, littered with the small stickers with which the girls had played. The back seat was the tonal opposite of a stock crime scene: instead of a grim consequence of violence, it was the aftermath of an enjoyable ride in the car, and I felt almost as though I could live vicariously through the residues of little girls' decisions.

For some reason - or perhaps for an obvious reason: I haven't been very far afield of late - all sorts of vicarious travel have appealed to me over the past week. Last night, I finished Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, and enjoyed picturing the small Cairene cafe around which the novel swirls. On Saturday evening, I made a big batch of foul, a common Middle Eastern bean soup, in an attempt to evoke the aura of an Aleppo restaurant where I first tried it. Yesterday, while a colleague described his upcoming trip to Buenos Aires and Rio, I imagined the drama of flying into seaside Brazil. And the Sunday Times travel section, with pictures of a Patagonian ice bar? Sure: let's go.

But perhaps the simplest example, in this vein, involves our morning commute. These days, the routine is rather simple: drive the lovely, tree-lined avenues of Roland Park, glide along the park-like University Drive, and drop L. at Hopkins; then merge with the sclerotic rush-hour traffic, and drive southwest, through gritty Remington, to Cleo's nursery school; walk to my own campus. It's an interesting, varied drive, and we certainly can't complain about its length: at around 20 minutes total, it's a fraction of many local commutes. Still, though, it can use the occasional augmentation. And so, when I recently bought a batch of classic recordings of the Muslim call to prayer and pushed them into the car's CD drive at 8:05 on a recent morning, the result was surprisingly stirring. Suddenly we were not merely waiting for a green light; it was as though we were also in Fez, or Medina, or Mosul. The muezzin's voice wrapped around us, suggesting a pace very different from the staccato motion of the traffic, and even as we drove to our familiar workplaces and schools, we seemed to already have arrived somewhere else quite different.