Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??
And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….
This is easy. I march myself into the newstand and buy something, ANYTHING, to read while waiting and while flying. I know there probably isn't anything I want to read or would choose normally, but this is an EMERGENCY, after all. So I would read the latest best-seller, or the latest issue of O Magazine, or just anything.
That's how it is around here. Anything is better than nothing.
i would read the back of a shampoo bottle if i had to -- and have in a rare pinch. i've read the dictionary, cookbooks, and ::gasp!:: even a t.v. guide while visiting a non-reader's home.
of course, this is exactly why i keep a box of books on the floor of my truck. smockdaddy pokes fun at me for this "emergency book box", but i don't care. what else am i supposed to do while waiting in traffic?
One time I read Guns and Ammo in a pinch. That was interesting. There was a really long article on reloading your own shells.
I wonder what the other people on the plane thought with me sitting there reading that?
And I always have a book in my car. I spend too much time waiting in car line or in waiting rooms or somewhere to EVER leave home without something to read.
amen, sistah! car lines receive a bad rap -- probably from all those non-readers, too.
I too have resorted to Guns and Ammo. Some sort of aviation magazines and my father's printing industry
magazines. Anything...
Cereal boxes are good. Does anyone of a certain age remember a cereal (this was back in the sixties!) that actually had some sort of mini-book on the back of the box. I wish they still made that.
You have inspired me to keep a stack of old New Yorkers in the trunk of my car. Just in case...
It just came to me...the cereal was TWINKLES!
(I have no recollection of how it tasted, but I loved the box.)