Saturday, July 21, 2012

Sunshine


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.

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