I am on my way to visit family in NJ. I am on my second five hour flight, the first from Kauai to LA and now this one, taking me to Newark. I swear just as I started this, we are experiencing some delightful turbulence on what has been a smooth flight until now. We’ll see how that goes and I’ll get back to you from the cockpit.
I don’t fly all that often and each time, it is a very disorienting experience. On this trip, I have been unable to watch any movies on the screen, which seems to be about six inches from my face. I rarely bring anything to read and this is no exception. I think airports are a totally surreal experience, kind of a portal what’s to come on the steel bird.
The energy level on these birds is pretty overwhelming. Every seat is occupied by someone with a story and it is hard for me to relax, because I feel surrounded by human turbulence. Personally, it feels even more intense, because my life on Kauai is relatively calm and fairly uncomplicated, just the way I like it. Oh, speaking of turbulence, we are back to smooth sailing.
I tried to sleep on the first flight, the red eye to LA, which didn’t happen. I marvel at how some people can contort themselves into the strangest positions and somehow manage to sleep for the entire flight. I find the seats incredibly uncomfortable, with nowhere to put my legs, while my entire upper body feels coiled like a snake with a hernia.
On this second flight, I have just been sitting here and thinking, not about anything in particular, mind you. Everywhere I look, those little in your face screens have something totally different going on, with some people mesmerized and others zombie like in their blankness. The lady right across the aisle from me, has a fabric draped over her head and I think she has turned into a terrifying monster and I am afraid to see what has happened to her.
I always put my computer and assorted chargers in a backpack, along with my at the ready sunglasses, my reading glasses, along with two seven compartment, plastic pill containers. I have one for my morning, life saving dozen pill regimen and the nighttime assortment in the others. I use the green color for AM and the purple for PM.
I have been sitting here for several hours with the computer under foot, thinking I ought to unsheathe and do some writing, but I couldn’t think of anything worth sharing. I am one of those people, who is always thinking and I don’t mean in a nervous way either. My mind is on and when I’m awake, it’s working. I think about the things I am sharing with you now and God only knows what else is right around the bend in my brain.
On those occasions when I do travel, I fancy myself a writer and hope someone will ask me what I do for a living, which hasn’t happened, primarily because I do keep to myself, which is what happens when you think. I seem to get drawn deeper into myself when I am overwhelmed by new experiences. When I took my solo motorcycle journey through northern CA and southern OR, it felt like I was harvesting words, because my vocabulary had ripened on the road. A few years after that, I traveled to Tuscany and it felt like living in heaven, surrounded by magic and stories.
Going to visit family isn’t quite as exotic as traveling to places I’ve not known before. Most importantly, I don’t feel it is any longer appropriate for me to write about my experiences. I think I got all of that out of my system when I wrote a kind of memoir for the benefit of my grandson. I wrote a lot about other people that were a part of my life, because there was no other way to share my stories. When he is old enough and that will not be for quite a while, he will get to read my history and travel around my inside my head.
After the book, I have kept writing and have accumulated quite a number of these little ditties. In the beginning of that new effort, I did write about my grandson and included pictures of him as well. His father, my son, didn’t want me to do that, because it took away his right to privacy and it changed the direction of my stories since then. I will not hesitate to write about myself, but I keep others off the page. People like the lady with the scarf over her terrifying new face don’t count.
So, around an hour or so ago, I reached down for the computer and my reading glasses and decided to share some plane time with you and I hope you don’t mind. I guess this is a little like a Seinfeld episode, little ado about nothing. However, I have benefitted greatly from this experience.
I just tried to press any of the icons on the damn screen and it seems to be ignoring my finger and I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the two young children, who are sitting next to me and are very adept with their screen commands. I just want to know how much longer until I get to Newark. I think it’s about another hour and a half. I have made this trip countless times and I definitely starting running out of patience around now, because enough is enough already.
This is probably a good time to say goodbye, before this gets even too boring for me. Thank you so much for keeping me company for this part of my trip. I am sure I will write again, once I am ensconced in Weehawken, NJ with my family.
By the way, the turbulence has just returned and I shit you not. Go figure!