Sunday, May 2, 2021

Travelin' man.

 



     I've travelled by gondola and burro and aerial tram, taken streetcars around New Orleans and cable cars around San Francisco, crowded into tap-taps in Port-au-Prince and clung to tuk-tuks in Bangkok, sailed across the Atlantic and around the tip of South America, taken bullet trains across Japan and France, flown in biplanes and helicopters and the Goodyear blimp. I get around, or used to, before COVID grounded me and, to expand my perspective beyond its usual focus, the whole world too.
     So my emotion, returning to air travel Friday, for a quick hi-folks-remember-me? visit to Boulder is perhaps surprising. Or at least worth noting. It was not joy or relief or even enthusiasm, but the deepest calm I ever experienced going from Point A to Point B. I didn't sweat the plane tickets—hard to do, since my wife bought 'em. Didn't sweat the packing or the cab. Sat facing away from the gate as they called the rows and, to be honest, when I did turn around at "4" imagined the gate empty and the plane gone. And smiled.
    Everyone on board wore their masks when they weren't sipping their bottles of water or nibbling their Stroopwafels and mini-pretzels. I ordered coffee black and didn't worry too much about lowering my mask to drink it. The air smelled medicinal.  
    No worries. Maybe surviving the pandemic, so far, is part of that. Just as I used to say that after you give up drinking everything else is easy, after you hunker down for a year to avoid a plague ravaging the world, well, whether you get a window or an aisle seat just isn't that big a deal anymore. I can't say whether this is permanent or the result of a ... calculating .... 14 month pause in flitting hither and yon, a period when the longest trip was a drive up to Madison to find out who opens the Cologuard jars. 
     True, when the United Airbus took off, I did ruminate, as I always do, that the first 10 seconds the plane is in the air are the most dangerous in the flight, when you find out if you'll get where you're going or end up spread across a field, like American Flight 191, with workers picking you out of the muck with tweezers.
     But if the past that thought came as a kind of hard squint, this time it was a distant ruffle, soft and vague, like a bell tolling twice in a church steeple far away.

8 comments:

  1. Maybe it's my google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers acting up. But the Cologuard column link doesn't seem to be working. It's so annoying.

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    1. Here is the link Bernie.

      http://www.everygoddamnday.com/2020/09/cologuard-has-drawbacks-but-better-than.html

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    2. Thanks Sandy. Normally my silly comments get tossed, and problems get fixed. Neil decided to demonstrate my superdupercilious nature.

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    3. No, sorry, just busy. I don't know why those links drop out like that—it happens a lot. I put in the proper link. Then it just disappears.

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    4. I don't know what to call the entity that carries your blog, but it completely forgets me at times so I am not surprised that it forgets a link or two.

      Delete
  2. "...the first 10 seconds the plane is in the air are the most dangerous in the flight, when you find out if you'll get where you're going or end up spread across a field, like American Flight 191, with workers picking you out of the muck with tweezers."

    Love it...that's wordsmithing at its finest.
    To a sick puppy like me--pure poetry.

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  3. Visiting a friend in May 1979, his sister stopped by with a friend. They were exited about a n end of school trip they were taking soon. When a coworker interrupted me about Flight 191, I didn't make the connection, but those two young women perished that afternoon. I'm not so sure my friend would appreciate the imagery.

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    Replies
    1. There's always a person who slipped on a banana peel and became a paraplegic and so doesn't like banana jokes. They're not the intended audience.

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