Long Day’s Journey
Task 37, Sept. 26 to October 3d
“Travel is recess. And we need it.” Anon.
I’m on a short vacay with my wife. We’re visiting our son in West Palm Beach Florida, which for a liberal like me is literally the belly of the beast. But to be fair to Mr. Trump, less the humidity, South Florida is stunningly beautiful.
Over the past 50 years I’ve traveled about half a million miles, from Cairo to Amsterdam, most of it in coach, and frankly the hassles, i.e. lost luggage, middle seat squeeze-outs, endless circling above an airport, rolled off me like water off a duck’s back (dad phrase), but in the last few years, now that I have the wherewithal to afford business/first class, I’ve gotten, well, persnickety (dad word) and anything, anything that gets in the way of me boarding/relaxing/exiting the plane, makes me anxious and angry, not necessarily in that order.
But, the best laid plans…
—The flight departs at 6:02am. My bad for selecting the flight, so I am already anxious when I arrange a ride to the airport that will get us there by 5am, which means we have to leave the house at 4:30am, which means we have to be up at 4am, which means I will wake up in a cold sweat at 3:30, worried that the driver won’t be on time.
—We get to the airport ok, and I check out the gate area to scope things out (necessary recon) then look for a spot to sit down that’s not too far from the gate but not close to any other passengers. I don’t want to interact with anyone, but…
—of course that’s what happened. A married couple that knows us in a marginal way spot us, descend on us and don’t just say “hi, funny to see you here” and walk away…no, they stand over us for the next fifteen minutes and gleefully yammer about their excursion they are embarking on to, of all places, Scotsboro, Alabama, which is the home of the only unclaimed baggage store in the U.S. It’s a tradition, I guess.
—We board, but only after half a dozen wheel-chair bound people board first. Each one of them is subjected to my withering, judgmental stare, because I suspect that at least half of those so-called wheelchair-needy people are, in my opinion, “so-called”.
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—Mercifully we are in the first seating zone and as soon as it’s called we jump to our feet and scramble to board. All good until a woman boards with a 80 pound german shepherd service dog that she tries to fit into the four inches of space between her and her seat mate, who is a stranger to her and NOT interested in traveling to our first stop, Salt Lake City, with a giant beast slobbering in his leg, and he demands a new seat, which of course doesn’t exist, and the ensuing argument draws in three flight attendants and the co-pilot, and ends with the man huffily exiting the aircraft, delaying us by a half hour.
—which means that we will have to sprint from our plane to the gate of our connecting flight, and I can admit, without shame, that my sprinting days are far behind me, but I’ll have to give it my best try, which I’ll do with teeth a-grit and rising ire due to the lettuce shrapnel on my left shoulder that came from a balsamic salad that the guy in the seat behind me was eating when the plane convulsed in a pocket of bad air…
—bad air that the pilot said we would miss because he was going to fly around it, and I suspect that he and his co-pilot giggled when the plane suddenly dropped ten feet and passengers screamed and the gentleman’s salad exploded (I was only hit in the shoulder but the the two people sitting behind us looked like they’d gone for a swim in a salad bar).
—And of course we missed our connecting flight. Which meant a four hour wait in the Delta terminal at Salt Lake City, which is a beautiful airport but teeming with white, well manicured boy and girl Mormon missionaries that looked at me as though they were looking at the devil incarnate.
—We arrive in Fort Lauderdale (which conjured up memories of spring break tom-foolery—dad word—of fifty years prior), and then we had to search high and low for our baggage, which no one could locate but—as a customer service agent told us with a straight face—would be delivered to our Airbnb.
—Finally, we stagger out to the curb, and we are hit with a wall of sticky sub-tropical air that slumps the shoulders and widens the pores, but mercifully, before I collapsed, our ride pulled up and we were rescued.
As I lay in the back seat of my son’s car, mopping my forehead with a used McDonald’s napkin, I thought about the previous twelve hours, the trials and travails of domestic travel, the wear and tear on my aging body, the gritty film on my teeth and lingering smell of balsamic on my shirt, and I vowed I would never travel again, but then my son looked at me and said, “good to see you, pops.” And I thought…
It wasn’t so bad after all…
Task: Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative…