JavaJennifer

The last flight I took was the one that brought me back to DC from California through Phoenix just after the New Year.  You may recall that I had the misfortune of being seated next to a man so vile that just moments before they shut the cabin door, I called the flight attendant to discuss the consequences of deplaning.  She explained to me that while it was my right to do so, she highly discouraged it.  I endured the flight and then had stomach flu about a day an a half later.  http://javajennifer.com/2009/01/03/sarcasm-is-the-refuge-of-losers/

The truth is though, in the 80 some odd times I flew in 2008, that was my worst flight… and technically that flight happened in 2009.  I count is as 2008 because I was out of town the last two weeks of the year on an itinerary that started on my birthday.  I’m counting this as my first flight of the year, DC to Charlotte, Charlotte to Houston and then the whole thing in reverse tomorrow.

I’m typing this into MS Word at 38,000 feet which means that when I do the cut and past later, the fonts will be wrong, Lao Lao will have to edit and I’ll go back and edit this piece out about the fonts. Unless of course he doesn’t do the edits in which case it will just look funny and you’ll all know that it’s funny because I wrote it in MS Word.  You won’t care, but you’ll know.

Seated in the new First Class of a US Airways Boeing 737, I’m in the envy seat:  3F. I’m seated at the window, a “portal” he says, with nothing behind me but the bulkhead to coach.  Outside the lights of Charlotte flicker and twinkle and I’m reminded of how vast the United States really is.  Each light is a person, a family.  Someone is celebrating a birthday. Someone is sick.  Someone just proposed.  Someone decided to get a divorce.  We live and die under the expanse of a sky to big for me to understand.  In this sky, inside a metal tube hurtling toward Texas to a rental car, a hotel to a meeting I’m supposed to care about.  The longer I walk though this life not unhappy, but not fully realized, the more I question everything.

I wonder what it would be like if I stopped traveling, went either home or Home and stayed long enough to find a happy routine that re-built my health, saved grace.  I wonder, would I miss the time in First Class?  The hotel points?  The VIP treatment at security?

And if I moved from DC… did I leave any kind of legacy?  Would people miss me beyond the first week or two?  And with my heart in pieces all over the country, where do I go?  To Denver to be near my best friend and my brother?  To Califonia to be near my mother and other brother? To Florida where my friendships have flourished in the 12 years since I last lived there?  To Omaha to try to re-build the fractured relationship I have, or more specifically don’t have with my father?  To someplace completely random where I know no one?  Or do all roads lead to Kansas City?

Kansas City.  Unless you’ve been there, you can’t know what a great place it is.  That it has a lively arts and music scene, restaurants that rival any in DC and that on sunshiny days after a rain, all you can smell is earth and grass.  People are generally kind to one another and extend courtesies like “please” and “thank you” that we are too busy for on the east coast, too self-important with our collective obsession with political power and persuasion.  Perpetually stuck in traffic, we lie to ourselves about the  length of our commute.

But Kansas City has a small economy.  I worry about leaving a city with endless job opportunities to willingly go into an environment where I’ll be competing with recently laid off Sprint employees and new college graduates for a handful of jobs at a quarter the salary  of what I make now.  And unlike DC, the weather in Kansas City has brutal extremes bitter cold, hot humidity and in between days and days of gloom.  But catch it on a mild, sunny day with the fountains streaming arcs of water on Ward Parkway,  or the rose garden at Loose Park and there is no place in the world I’d rather be.

After all, Kansas City is just a place.  But it’s known to me most as Home.  Each of us has that place and if you’re living there now, then you know how good it feels.  If you’re not, you may like where you’re living but it still isn’t Home.  And the pull of Home can be as strong as the tides.

The thing not spoken is my deepening affections for TS.  In him, I see dueling laptops between a pot of coffee, wide-planked hardwood floors in neighborhoods I know from memory, lively discussions about books we’ve read or meant to.  And laughter.  Side bruising, gasping for breath, tears down my face, laughter.

I’m dangerous at 38,000 feet.  Hell, I’m dangerous at sea level.

And I’m especially dangerous on my 7th day without coffee.

Tags: Moving, Planes, Questions, Travel

This entry was posted by javajennifer on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 6:24 am and is filed under Blog Blend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.