On What Was a Friday Morning

Been a while since I’ve lain down in a bed.   On what was a Friday morning, I was up before three in the morning in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica.  We drove for two and a half hours to the San Jose airport where we bought a refrigerator magnate with my wife’s name on it and a stuffed sloth, and flew to Houston.  We got into that airport around noon.  At that airport we had to kill twelve more hours till we boarded a midnight flight to Beijing.  Thirteen hours later we landed at what was effectively four in the morning local time, Saturday, in Beijing.  Good to be home.  The sun was coming up when we got settled.  The electricity was off, the heating was off, the refrigerator was nearly bare and what remained was questionable after two weeks away, so we got into remedying these things and by now we were all well awake, summoned by the early morning sun’s uppity insistence.  I got to work as one can only do at one’s own desk, after having been away a while.  Ate some lunch, packed a bag, took a shower and kissed my older daughter “good bye”; my younger had already drifted off to sleep, and went out to the car.  Driving too fast for my wife’s taste, I drove opportunistically back to the airport arriving with about four minutes to spare before they closed the gate.  Darting off the shuttle train at immigration I went to the “my plane is already boarding line”, and immediately was allowed passage to the front.  I say the same thing to the security guard after I’m through.  He removes the barrier and lets me pass.  What gate? I wonder as I wait to put my things on the conveyor belt:  twenty-five.  A shot of espresso, and a soda water can be had en route and I am at the gate with seventy people still in line.  United has a little empty lane, just for me and I can go right through again and I’m searching out where 19F is.  Shoes off, book out, computer out, chord out, everything just so.  Use the rest room, before your buckled in, return, consider the man you’ll be spending the next fourteen hours next to.  He has a thin frame.  Good.  Begin to read but decide, perhaps to collect my thoughts, instead.

Flying over to Newark this afternoon.  I know this routine much better than many more important things.  Yes, it would have been more logical to fly to Newark from Houston.  Seeing the family back home after the trip was important, flights weren’t easily changed and the comparative cost was actually cheaper to just get the one round trip rather than trying to get creative with two one-ways.  And though it is a cliché, the plane can, with WiFi, and electrical outlets, serve as an office.  So, it’s back to work, back to my novel, back to holding my head up when it wants to lie down.  I am looking forward to getting horizontal before too much more time passes by.  My neck tells me it is important.   We’re taxiing.  I’m flabbergasted that none of the many stewards and stewardesses passing me by have yet to tell me to put this computer away.  It almost makes you wonder if the rules have changed.  That is unlikely.  I’ll do it myself then.  I can concentrate on this C.K. Mann Highlife, up in my ears.

I will be asleep soon.  I can feel it. I have the best intentions about work.  There is a lot to do.  But I can sense that it won’t last long after the first meal United serves, some hour from now. 

It didn’t.