Everybody’s been
wondering where you you’ve been
And now that we know
what happened
We’re all wondering
where you are
After 26 hours of travel, I received a surprise upgrade to
first class for the final leg of my trip home.
I’ve been away from family, old friends, loved ones in
general, for at least 378 days. And now, on this third and last plane trip of
this overextended day, I am drinking decent red wine from a glass tumbler.
The Alaska Airlines 737-700 has bigger, more tightly spaced
windows than the A330s I rode earlier. So now, in between bites of boeuf
bourgignon, I can clearly see the Montana rumplelands below the patchy clouds,
waiting calmly, monochrome laundry in need of ironing. The porthole makes as good
or better a rowmate than the Ethiopian-cum-Kenyan chemist/investor or the
Indian UN water sanitation expert from this morning or last night,
respectively.
I’m going home, where everything is how I know, where I don’t
feel proud when I’m able to communicate. But red yellow and green of the cherry
tomatoes and spinach on my plate remind me of the country I left so recently. I
remember explaining once to my tenth grade students the feeling of being in a
plane as it takes off. If I had three thousand dollars, I might bring one with
me just so that we can share that experience of watching the clouds go by.
It’s Ramadan, but I drank three IPAs and ate a bacon
cheeseburger in Minneapolis, total cost equal to one fifth of my monthly
salary. Luckily I am still in possession of the local salt, tree pepper (gileh), and snakeskin wallet I brought
into the US with me; the customs officer served in PC Thailand in the sixties.
And now I’m moving mouthfuls of spinach or potato to my mouth with my forbidden
hand (via fork).
This twenty-first of July, snow is hiding on the northern
sides of those little wrinkles that are slowly crescendoeing into the Rocky
Mountains. Nevertheless, some valleys are parsected into neat fields the colors
of apples and pears, more brilliant access roads leading to the tiny gleaming
silos at their centers. Seeing the US road network from above, I imagine an
immense and ever-multiplying fleet of bulldozers paving machines civil
engineers spreading across the landscape like liquid into a watershed after the
dam breaks. If one mile of paved high way costs about one million dollars, how
many families could be fed for how many months for the cost of building all the
spur roads in Minnesota and North Dakota?
And they just brought me cookies. Soft and warm. Sometimes
some things just fall into place, into places you didn’t realize were there to
fall in to.