Skip to main content

The Trip Home

 


My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day.

So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station.

I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and Wallkill, etc.. Kill is from the Dutch word for water body, usually a river or a creek). We trundled along the Hudson in darkness for the first half hour. Then the dawn light begins to infuse the landscape. We see the river. It is a majestic river, or inlet, or whatever it is. The far cliffs hang like monuments over the western side.  

In early morning light, we ride through Yonkers, and when we start seeing the Harlem River, I realize we are in the Bronx. Crossing the river (or whatever it is) we stop once in Harlem and then are soon underground for the rest of the trip. At Grand Central Station, son guides us to a ticket kiosk and we have our ticket for Jamaica. He takes us to our train. We hug and say our goodbyes.

On the rails again, this time on the Long Island RR, we make our way to Jamaica Station, first in the underground caverns that resemble some science fictional dystopian world. Then we emerge in the bright sunlight of Queens. We have obviously crossed under the East River (a river, or inlet, or whatever it is. I think maybe I will go back to calling them all kills). We bump along on the train until we get to Jamaica Station. Getting off the train, we know we have to go up a level. Wife saw that there was an elevator (yay!). We find the elevator and it is broken. We go back to the stairs where there is an escalator . . . broken. Sigh, I grabbed both suitcases and we trudge upstairs. We make our way to the Air Train. We get on the train and when we get to the first stop, I learn is not actually going to all the terminals. To get to some of the terminals you have to get off and transfer to a different train. But fortunately for us, this train was going to the terminal we needed (Terminal 7). We get off at Terminal 7 and we are at JFK! We made it.

At a kiosk we get our boarding passes. While printing wife’s pass, the display reads “Printing boarding pass.” But while printing mine, it says, “printing travel document.” Hmm. Examination of the passes reveals that while my wife has a seat assignment, mine does not. We take it to an attendant, who takes it to another attendant, and another until someone is able to figure out what is going on. The seat I was assigned is broken. They tell me they will give me a seat assignment at the gate. When we get to the gate, we have to wait an hour or so for staff to show up. When they do, they tell me that there were no seats left on First Class but they will find me a seat in Economy and I would be refunded the difference. They apologize. So, wife will be in First Class and I in Economy. Okay. In the grand scheme of things, this is not really a problem. They do let me board with her, so I can get my carry-on stowed in the overhead bin before everyone in Economy started fighting for a spot.

I sit in an aisle seat two men on my left. There is no window on our row, nor is any other window visible to me. I can tell when we were taking off. I can feel it. I cannot see anything. I notice the information placard on the seat in front of me which says that we are on a Boeing 737 Max plane. Hmm. Weren’t those the ones that kept falling out of the sky? Great.

Did I mention we had skipped breakfast because we knew we were going to be fed on the plane? Wife will get fed. She is in First Class. I get pretzels. There is no entertainment, no screen to watch anything or listen to anything. Those in the know have brought tablets with earphones, and they can apparently hook into an in-flight network for entertainment. But I have none of that. I do have a book, though the light is dim and hard to read by. Each seat has its own reading light, but as I am on the aisle, the switch is way over to the left of the men sitting next to me. I reached over and switch it on. The beam is cut off by the head of my neighbor. I read for a bit. Unsatisfactory. I get out my notepad and jot down some lines of this you are now reading. Again, it is hard to see what I am doing, and I give up after a while, close my eyes and try to sleep. This pattern is repeated: try to read, try to write, try to sleep. Near the end of our five-hour flight, we start to descend for landing. Not being able to see anything, I have to imagine what is happening. We get to a point where I think we must be getting close to the runway, then we hit some turbulence. I am thinking, this is not good, hitting turbulence as you are landing. Hmm. But it goes on and on with more turbulence, and I decide we must not be as close as I thought. I literally do not know if we are 50 feet above the ground or 1500 feet. Close your eyes. Relax. What will be, will be.

The ride smooths out. We land. We survive. Now we just have a three-hour drive home. Yay.

Star Liner


Comments

  1. Deb ParrOctober 15, 2023 at 10:39 AM

    This is a great.story of your & Joyce's Adventure --Yet I loved hearing it in person More ! 😉☺️

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mr. TwisterApril 22, 2024 at 12:23 AM

    this was so fun to read! glad you survived ;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

  Despite both of us having science backgrounds, my wife and I share a leaning toward the artistic, though we may express it in different ways. In her life, my wife has been a painter, a poet, a singer, an actor, and a fiction writer. Not to mention a mother. I don’t remember what precipitated this event, but my wife, my son, and I were at home in the front room. My wife was responding to something my son said. She said, “remember, you get half your brains from me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a complete idiot.” To which my son started howling with laughter and said to me,” I think you have just been insulted.” Sometimes I feel like Rodney Dangerfield. I get no respect. But that is not an uncommon state of affairs for fatherhood. When my son was going to middle school and high school, my wife was always the one to go in with him to get him registered for classes. One time she was unable to go and I had to be the one to get him registered. “Ugh,” he said. “why can’t Mama do i...
1 comment
Read more

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

A Deception

  I have a secret. I deceived my mother. Okay, it was like 50 years ago and she is gone now, but still . . .  I was generally a good boy. I did as I was told. My family lived a pretty strait-laced, middle-class, fairly conservative life. We were a G-rated family, well, until my older siblings broke the mold, but at this time, I was still in the mold. My friend Rich and I made a plan. Rich had asked me if I wanted to see Cabaret . He said he didn’t think much of Liza Minnelli, but he wouldn’t mind seeing her take her clothes off. We were like 13 years old and sex was ever-present on our minds as much as it was absent in our households. Cabaret was not rated R. It was rated PG. The ratings system has changed since that time. There was no PG-13; there was just the choice of G, PG, and R  (X was not an official rating).  Apparently the makers of Cabaret satisfied the ratings commission enough to escape an R rating, so it was PG.   There was therefore no law or ...
Post a Comment
Read more