We 300+ anonymous travelers become a single plane for the duration of the flight, until we reach our destination: Amsterdam-Schiphol International Airport. Since I am going almost to the exact other side of the globe, I could theoretically fly either way. But I always fly east, into the night. The afternoon dissipated, the sun set in a moment, and then the morning came too soon. Breakfast at Minnesota midnight?
***
I almost left Benginald in Mellby until February, but Spencer made me bring him along. He has been my travel buddy for the past 10 years and I thought he was getting old enough to stay at home by himself for a few weeks, but I was wrong. Spencer said he would get lonely, and that my leaving him behind showed that I didn’t care about him anymore.
When I passed through security, the officer checked my passport and boarding pass and nodded at Bengi. “Is this your boyfriend?” he asked. I laughed. “Sure is.”
The guard gave me a nice smile but looked surprised to see me. “Well hello there,” he said as though I was a fascinating but previously undiscovered species. “Thank you.” His eyes followed me out.
I saw Sarah Jacobson, whose parents live in Tanzania, shoving her carryon into the overhead compartment. I called out to her and she said how funny it was that she’d made it through MSP without seeing a single Ole, and then here I was two rows back. The people in the rows around us smiled too, and a few of them caught my eye.
I blame it on Benginald. He’s good news.
***
The Ericksons are interested in traditions. My family doesn’t have any.
I’m looking for traditions. Two years ago, almost to the day, I started making my own. I remember perching on the edge of the couch, feeling self-conscious about my cheap and unthoughtful Christmas gifts, because my mom told me that her family goes in for giving talents. “Give them poetry,” she suggested, so I didn’t spend any money on material things until I got to Cortes and saw the pile of nicely wrapped gifts under the tree.
So I did both. I spent some time copying poems out of my book with Sharpie onto brown paper bags and wrapped my mediocre presents with them. I remember perching on the edge of the couch and reading it out loud, duet, the first spoken-word piece I’d ever attempted.
Like everything else, it’s about being in love.
***
It’s Friday night. I’m standing in the doorway still wearing my coat, hat, scarf and boots, facing him wearing only his boxers. I’m just standing there scuffing my feet, watching him meticulously pull of each piece of tape so he doesn’t ruin the wrapping paper. Not one single word. He wants to read them later.
I tell him I won’t be offended if he rips it, but secretly I savor the fact that he wants to keep it. He wants to read it. He loves my wrapping paper probably as much or more than he will love his presents.
***
The woman at the end of my row is reading Twilight in paperback. I smile thinking about how many people I’ve seen reading it without the slipcover, trying to hide the fact that they are actually reading Twilight. It’s like a secret cult, with everyone who has read it knowing exactly what the uncovered cover looks like and exchanging looks that say, “I read them too – in a public place, without the dust jacket.” It’s like the early Christians who would draw half of a fish in the sand with their toe while they talked to someone new. If the other person drew the other half of the fish, both knew that the other was also a Christian, and they could worship together.
I laugh every time I reference Twilight in everyday conversation, but it’s actually been relevant multiple times. Vampires DO exist, and sex is immortal. To me it reinforces the fact that in order to live forever we must be cold and hard as marble… or eat the brains of the living and mortal.
If that’s immortality, I’m not interested.
***
In June, right after my junior year, I was sitting in the first row of business class on a flight from Munich to Paris with my friend Alisa and her father. Before economy class boarding, the flight attendants came around with a stack of free magazines. I didn’t speak German or French, so I tried to pick something with good pictures.
When the rest of the passengers started boarding, they all snickered at the two wide-eyed 16-year-old girls flipping through copies of Playboy, pretending to read the articles (which were all in German) and instead being visually assaulted by glossy full-page photos of enormous, unrealistic bosoms bouncing around on a muddy soccer field like skin-colored footballs.
***
At the beginning of that year, I sat in the Toronto airport with Ella and Katie, pretending to be engrossed in our crossword puzzles and conversation while in reality our eyes were peeled for our fellow travelers, especially a bushy-haired girl we’d never seen before. Her name was Nicole. According to her email, she would be wearing hot pink capris and looking confused.
On the plane, I sat next to her and we wrote notes back and forth to Gus and Paul, the two boys from Connecticut who sat diagonally behind us. Paul had a guitar and told us what Valium was, and why he fell asleep almost immediately. Gus carried on the conversation after that but we didn’t really know what to say to each other so the chat eventually petered out.
In the simulated evening, when the cabin lights went out, the woman in front of us (who had a very unhappy baby) turned around and asked the girl next to me to please shut off her reading light. She was engrossed in the newest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so I offered her my flashlight.
***
After the interminable boarding process at Amsterdam-Schiphol, I found my seat in the exit row, between a distinguished Sikh businessman and a distinguished Indian gentleman. They were engaged in conversation, and I blazed in wearing skinny jeans, high tops and a cutoff T-shirt, threw Benginald the Stuffed Moose down on my seat and hefted my backpack into the overhead compartment. They both looked at me and commented that my travel companion needed a seatbelt, and then continued their conversation behind my head.
The pilot came on to make an announcement that the flight was being held for several passengers on an incoming flight, and the gentleman on my right got up to take a turn about the cabin. While he was gone, a bright-eyed young English woman flew in and sat down in his seat. The Sikh, who introduced himself to me as Hipi, told her, “There is a gentleman sitting there already.” As soon as she got up to sort out the confusion, the gentleman came back, and then the British girl returned with a flight attendant who told the gentleman he had been moved up to first class.
It pays to be a frequent flyer.
***
The girl’s name is Amy. She had come straight in from London Heathrow and headed for Delhi to travel with her longtime boyfriend Seb. If they had missed this connection, they would be stuck in Amsterdam until after Christmas, so she and the nine other passengers from London are very grateful that KLM held the flight.
They have few plans but hope to visit Jaipur and Goa, hope for a Christmas dinner in Delhi, hope their mothers don’t worry too much about them while they update their travel page on getjealous.com. We enlighten each other on the British and American education systems, and she tells me about career life in the UK, about Seb and the adventures they have had together. She says that all the photos she’s seen of India feature cows, piles of trash, bright colors, and signs that don’t quite work in English. I laugh and say that seems pretty accurate.
My calculations put her at about 30 years of age, but her chic short red hair and huge blue eyes make her seem much younger. She is very talkative and a little nervous to sally forth into the world with only Lonely Planet to guide her. I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she runs into any trouble.
***
If it took everyone three days to get home, I wonder how many of us would still go home for Christmas on a regular basis. By the time I reach my house, I have been wearing the same clothes for four days. I am completely exhausted, covered in the dirt of countless cities, and have been en route for 36 hours (only six of which I have been asleep). The date is three days after the date my flight left MSP – 4:00pm on Christmas Eve. It is the second time in my life that I have gotten home at the last minute before Christmas, and the first time in three years that I have been “home” for Christmas at all.
The first time I barely made it home for Christmas, I was seven. I had been in the hospital with a raging chicken pox infection and my parents picked me up in the middle of a blizzard at 8:30pm on December 24. The home videos from that Christmas tried desperately to catch glimpses of my spotted face, while I tried desperately to hide it.
That was 1996, the year Tickle-Me-Elmo was the gift of choice. Alisa told me once that all she knew about the US, she learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie Jingle All the Way. “But I know people don’t actually fight over toys for Christmas…”
I told her how my nurse in 1996 had somehow managed to get hold of a Tickle-Me-Elmo, which she planned to give me for Christmas until someone stole it from her hospital locker. She was heartbroken, and even though I didn’t miss the actual Tickle-Me-Elmo very much, to this day I am struck by disbelief that someone would steal a toy from a nurse in a hospital on Christmas Eve.
***
Benginald managed to get through international security and onto the plane without a passport. Once we got settled in seat 9B, he started flirting with the flight attendants. Everyone wants to know if he has ever been to India before. I tell them yes. In fact, he has been my travel buddy for 10 years and has been to India twice before. He is getting old enough to stay at home alone, but I felt bad about leaving him there for Christmas. Besides, he sometimes gets into trouble with Kenyon’s stuffed unicorn.
No one suspects that such an adorable, charming character like Bengi would be capable of the kinds of shenanigans they cause together. He puts everyone in a good mood, and sits nicely in my lap while we watch movie after movie on our personal video screen. He is the only one who always knows what those movies make me think about, and the only one who knows my complete back story. I don’t even have to tell him, and he sees it far more clearly than I ever could.
ATTENTION: FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT WILL BE ENDING SHORTLY.
No comments:
Post a Comment