In order to meet Paula for a cup of tea, yesterday, I had to walk through a blinding snow storm. It wasn’t a wholly unpleasant walk, though, because it did give me an opportunity to reflect that, in under a week’s time, we’ll be in California with Shiva, Roz and Rob, most likely squinting at the sun and (in my case, anyway) complaining about the heat.
We have a plan to convene at a particular, as-yet unstated location in Los Angeles, roughly 3,700 kilometers from home, in the first of what we hope will be a series of such meetings, each driven by a date, a set of coordinates and an ever-increasing degree of absurdity.
There was a time, recently, when such a travel plan would have seemed indescribably exotic to me; I didn’t grow up flying in airplanes. My highly-nuclear family didn’t get farther than 300 kilometers from home, so my perception of travel was that it meant loading all the firewood, life jackets and left mittens you could lay hands on into the eternity of the Volvo’s trunk, buckling into a big, Swedish seat, and emerging from it three hours later with sore knees and the shakes from too much sugar. This was travel when I was seven.
Twenty years later, I fly in airplanes, carry a computer, and am invariably on my way to a series of partially-planned meetings, mindful of the good impressions I have to make and hands I have to shake — I should work on the plane, but I always end up staring out the window.
In the car at age seven, I made believe I could drive, and that we could turn corners and stop at my every whim to look at funny mailboxes and rusting truck chassis. Now, looking down from the airplane, I wonder whether this or that stretch of land is flat enough to land on, and what my reward will be this time for being good and sitting still.