My taxi driver is from Pakistan. A large man, he swings my bag into the trunk of the cab. As we pull away from the airport I ask him if his first language is Urdu. Yes, he tells me, but he also speaks Punjabi and now English. Does he know anything about ghazals? I ask. I have been learning about Persian poetry, and in particular, the ghazal, a form that predates the sonnet. Oh, yes, he says. I see him smiling in the rear view mirror. Would he recite a few lines in Urdu for me?

I like to see eyebrows go up when unusual objects appear on the security screening at airports. I once traveled with a friend who had a dinosaur bone in his carry-on luggage. It was a real dinosaur bone, too. For the benefit of the security staff he unwrapped it and passed it around. My Hang drum is just about as odd. It resembles a mini-UFO and travels in a hard-shell case inside a specially designed backpack. At the Evers-Jackson Airport on my way home from Mississippi in May, I put my drum on the belt and watched to see the expression of the man standing besides the screen. His eyes widened.

“What's that?” He looked up to see who was going to claim this strange piece of luggage.