back to bahstahn

I’ve been anticipating this trip home since I bought the tickets four months ago. Really not so much homecoming, but home-visiting. As each day passes in California, the chances of me returning to Boston grow more slim. The man in my life will be arriving in a few days. He will see the city that structured me, the ‘East coast’ side of me that he nudges and laughs at and, I suspect, that he loves.

Flying across the country today, looking down on the mountains of California, the flatness of Texas, I puzzled over how different people are at both coasts, and as I witnessed in Kansas this summer, in the middle of the country too. Just more than and hour from our destination and the pilot informed us we were flying over West Virginia. Lights of roads and towns beneath me revealed themselves to be organic shapes, spreading outward and hugging the terrain, sparkling jellyfish on a dark ocean floor. Here, like at home, it looks as though the streets could have been paved by an actual person. Paved perhaps by the person whose name the street bears. Not the impossibly long, wide and endless roads of the west, whose names are as bland as the straight line they make across the earth.

Even though I have come to adore the west, the space, the climate, the openness that makes for a pillow of sorts around your soul; certain things, like baseball, books, necessity of wit, fondness for a sharp tongue and other ‘east coast’ identifiers, will never leave me.




I passed two uniformed officers from the Dallas/Forth Worth Police Department in the first class cabin. The voice of the pilot crackled on the speakers. He informed us that they were here to accompany another officer who had fallen in the line of duty. They were bringing him home. It took me a minute to realize this meant that his body was sharing the storage compartment with the rest of our holiday luggage. A different and grave return, one that was dreadfully anticipated by his family. Our plane was escorted to the edge of the runway by four police cars, before we were given a water canon salute. The plane rolled between two fire trucks bathing us with water. It felt a little like a solemn car wash. It seemed appropriate to be washed clean, in unison, this plane full of holiday travelers. Later I watched the flag draped coffin being unwrapped of it protective plastic, and loaded into a waiting ambulance.



On one of my first days of work ever, a man who walked up to the front desk and asked irritably, “Where is your grievance department?” As a fourteen year old, he seemed ridiculous, but now I am that person. Feeling quite free to offer up complaints or suggestions to run things more smoothly. Airports bring it out in me. Why can’t they fill the plane up from the back? It would move so much faster.

Somewhere over West Virginia, I lost my r's, and I was home again.