Ginger56’s Weblog

I sit in my room, pulled up to the sliding glass, looking out on the tarp-covered, snow covered pool and the surrounding yard. All white.

Truly quiet—snow quiet—now. The wind gentled and the flakes at rest, clear now, no falling. Near dusk and the few birds have sheltered. Is it the last snow of my life? I’m not so old, but Bradenton will never see such a storm and even here this snow is breaking records.

I do love to look at it. Here in the warm room, the cold merely laps at the sliding doors. My knees feel the chill while the outer air stiffens into clarity. It’s like a tv picture suddenly tuned to HD.

White lamp posts, white fence posts and white snow. Dark pine and darker trunks and lamplight, here and there, behind grey shadows, dappling drifts and piles. Darkest of all, bare twigs of a maple or oak against the pure grey sky. And now, the nearer white post lamps gleam on and tint the drifts beneath them with a barely yellow glow. There blackbirds shoot to roosts across the pointed tops of the pines and a headlight or two sweep past in the street beyond.

What isn’t here? The diners down the hall, slurping read sauce and garlic toast. My daughter. My husband. And the dead—my dead—beyond me, farther still.

Eventually, I gave up. A ticket agent’s litany of doom-saying wore me down. I called a hotel (several were already full) and found a room, re-booked my flight for Sunday—don’t bother with Saturday he assured me—and left the airport. Ironically, it took no more than ten minutes to get my bag off the flight. As I left, Delta employees were offering soft drinks to determined passengers still waiting, four hours past our departure schedule.

Outside, wet snow formed a sooty paste beneath the taxi tires, frigid wind tunneled through the shuttle port. We huddled against a concrete wall by the parking garage to wait, again. And the shuttle came. The driver was the event-planning agent for the hotel. Snow blanketed all the fields by now and traffic was slow and skittish. We reached the hotel where one couple discovered they’d come to the wrong place: how comforted I felt to be safe and warm and stopped. Unambiguously grounded.

8 March
In Columbus, it’s snowing—still or again, depending how you look at it. Wind gusts and, from time to time,  piles of snow on roofs and fence rails slide off or poof away, blurring still more the already blurry light.

I booked a room for two nights and arrived here yesterday afternoon. The airport had closed. At dinner in the in-house Italian restaurant, travelers already commisterated about their plights. A pregnant young woman with a two-year-old son, pitched in to help the lone waitress bus tables. After a few tentative clearings, she went on to try her hand at running food. I ate a salad of sorts, read Kundera and watched the customers.

I watched hours of TV, called home several times, and slept till 8:15—late for me.

At this point, I wish I could sleep again. At the complimentary breakfast, more of the stranded assembled, drank coffee, ate too much breakfast and shared our tables. An elderly woman with her friends, missing a funeral in Kansas. A darling fifteen-year-old bubbling with news of herself, who gave me a good chat on Harry Potter—she doesn’t like the ending either. A woman headed for Tampa, like me, but planning to leave this afternoon (Saturday). At 1:30, several ofus are back, a cheerful woman who has been here at all three meals thus far, the funeral goeer and my young “friend,” now accompanied by her mother.

Food comforts and occupies us. This, I think, is not news.

3/7/2008
I no longer like to fly—or maybe it’s once again. As a toddler< I recall, I threw up over the Himalayas and other places—cars, too, for that matter. but then I wasn’t scared, just woozy. During my college years, flying became routine, breezy, inconvenient if delayed, but even flying standby I generally made it on the flight I chose. Once I sat in first class by Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago 7—then still on trial in Chicago. I was surprised to find in the plush wide seats. (I was there because the seat was open, so for me it was a lottery win.)

In any case, flying represented a kind of transcendance—to be literally above it all really does afford some sense of peace and detachment. After visiting Swami Chetanananda in Boston, Anna, Bary and I flew home through ecstatic light above pristine clouds. Swamiji had given Anna a small bud vase with an orchid, and it sat catching that exalted light on our tray table, an anshor for our connection and a seeming proof of something eternal intersecting the moment. And flying to Dallas from Tampa, I remember gazing on orchards of cumulus—canyons? icebergs?—while the Gulf of Mexico lay darkened miles below.

Then my ears popped going to New York, one of them staying painfully stopped for days. Losing the hearing in the left ear several years later, I blamed that flight, reasonably or not, and remain convinced that the pressure somehow killed my ear.

So anxiety replaced the thrill. In the midst of flights, I suddenly recall that five miles separate me from earth and transcendance becomes terror. I no longer trust the great, wavering, but brittle looking wings. A jolt of turbulence sends me to prayer. I don’t feel fully happy again until we land.

This morning is particularly anxious. A great storm presses its way across the continent. Heavy rain, tornadoes already spotted in Tallahassee, snow and more storm headed here to Columbus and everywhere in between—the weather watchers promise. And here I sit obediently checked in with two hours to fret, prepared to allow a great metal lozenge to penetrate thick cloud and bear me above it all and take me home.

3/7/2008
I no longer like to fly—or maybe it’s once again. As a toddler< I recall, I threw up over the Himalayas and other places—cars, too, for that matter. but then I wasn’t scared, just woozy. During my college years, flying became routine, breezy, inconvenient if delayed, but even flying standby I generally made it on the flight I chose. Once I sat in first class by Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago 7—then still on trial in Chicago. I was surprised to find in the plush wide seats. (I was there because the seat was open, so for me it was a lottery win.)

In any case, flying represented a kind of transcendence—to be literally above it all really does afford some sense of peace and detachment. After visiting Swami Chetanananda in Boston, Anna, Bary and I flew home through ecstatic light above pristine clouds. Swamiji had given Anna a small bud vase with an orchid, and it sat catching that exalted light on our tray table, an anshor for our connection and a seeming proof of something eternal intersecting the moment. And flying to Dallas from Tampa, I remember gazing on orchards of cumulus—canyons? icebergs?—while the Gulf of Mexico lay darkened miles below.

Then my ears popped going to New York, one of them staying painfully stopped for days. Losing the hearing in the left ear several years later, I blamed that flight, reasonably or not, and remain convinced that the pressure somehow killed my ear.

So anxiety replaced the thrill. In the midst of flights, I suddenly recall that five miles separate me from earth and transcendence becomes terror. I no longer trust the great, wavering, but brittle looking wings. A jolt of turbulence sends me to prayer. I don’t feel fully happy again until we land.

This morning is particularly anxious. A great storm presses its way across the continent. Heavy rain, tornadoes already spotted in Tallahassee, snow and more storm headed here to Columbus and everywhere in between—the weather watchers promise. And here I sit obediently checked in with two hours to fret, prepared to allow a great metal lozenge to penetrate thick cloud and bear me above it all and take me home.

We have no ramp, perhaps because the plane is what I would normally call a “puddle jumper.” Ironically, ten minutes ago, I found myself reassuring a young woman who has never flown before. What else to do but tell her it will be fine? I wonder what she’s thinking now.

For my own confidence wavers again. These are small wings and we are dense with people and bags. Snow has begun—more than a flurry, the tiny flakes angle sharply in the wind. Already a slight white dust collars the ground crew’s sweatshirt hoods. The angle now approaches 90 degrees to the pavement, dark with wet. Diesel scents the cabin, and I am too warm.

The ground crew’s orange director sticks have gone up. The pilot’s cheery voice reassures that the snow is “no problem” something we’ll “blast right through” after de-icing.

A man in a blue truck’s cherry picker hosed us down with green anti-freeze, and we have taxied a long way out. The runways have accumulated at least half an inch, though the broad flat fields still show mostly an olive brown. A white SUV marked “Airport Operations” idles to my left out the window and plane number N188*1 waits to the right.

We have stopped again. Every few minutes the attendant troops from end to end of the cabin distributing water. We DO have access to the restrooms.

We are taxiing back. The airport has closed. We need fuel and re-de-icing. A small battalion of yellow plow trucks is out, scraping snow off this enormous lot. Planes are stopped at odd angles here and there across the wide snowy concrete. The crew expresses hope that after the second spray of green liquid we will in fact be airborne. Bits of slush slide down my porthole like very slow shapes in Tetris. I count seven trucks now in formation—no, ten or twelve, maybe more. “Heavy snow” is falling—too much for take-off, yet they continue to anticipate “medium” conditions. This looks highly doubtful to me. At this point, I expect to be in Columbus till Sunday, and think, miserably, it will be difficulty to find a room.

12:15 p.m. Two hours late for take-off, we sit reading, sleeping, sitting, peeing on the runway. Every ten minutes the attendant collects trash, her blond head nearly grazing the cabin roof. She let me move up from the last row to the seventh, in front of the wing now. I guess the snow is still falling. The plows seem to have stopped. The white ground blends with the sky. I can’t stop wondering where I’ll sleep tonight and how I’ll contact Bary—my cell phone is out of minutes and I have no computer for email—and no room booked.

4 March 2008
Have I come to Columbus to read about Spencer Reese in American Poetry Review on his decision to become a priest? Or poems by Elizabeth Spires, her new book due in a short time from Norton: Am I destined in all my thinkings and doings to be eclipsed by those quicker to react, quicker to formulate, more definite of intention—more defined & outward in the activity of their minds?

4 March 5:40 p.m.

Airport as destination: shades of Terminal I suppose.
In a aprinkling of near sleet, I mushed through soggy sod along the airport ramps and highways to sit “someplace else” and eat.

My pen is leaking so my fingers are as blue as in fifth grade when I first took up the cartridge pen—or was it third?

It’s a satisfactory hangout. Plenty of benches for crowds of people waiting. As at a shopping mall (as any U.S. reader knows) people here crisscross purposefully, but here they drag selected possessions in rectangular cases, as though walking dogs they don’t much care about but somehow must have with them. Some hurry, heels beating the terrazzo floor. Others, like me, browse the convenient shops. The final impulse before boarding seems to involve a need to purchase just one more thing. Some make sense: book to read, gum to relieve ear pressure, cereal bar instead of food for the long flight. Then, the souvenirs also make sense. In Columbus, there’s an emphasis on Ohio State memorabilia: lots of red and white on caps and cups, plenty of chocolate buckeyes that represent not only the school but Ohio, the buckeye state. Or one can simply sit or sit and eat.

I’ve equipped myself with American Poetry Review and The Unbearable Lightness of Being but at the moment, I choose to sit facing the security gate, barred like a prison. Its roped off corridors force travelers to zig and zag (having, as I mentioned, already “crisscrossed”) to reach the security agents with the xrays and metal detectors. Nearer to me a white poster commands “ENTER” in giant black, sans serif caps, marking for all the “rats” the entry to the maze.

To the right, one can buy books and magazines at one stall or golf miscellanea at another (presumably many travelers plan to golf when they arrive). To the left, a small food court with Wendy’s, La Famiglia and a sub shop. An array of uncomfortable, pressed metal mesh chairs affords a place to unwrap wraps and jab straws through plastic lids.

Just off-center, behind the “ENTER” sign, an inscrutable sculpture towers above us. The colors and shapes are pure comic book—primary colors outlined in havy black. Yellow, blue, white, red—and black, it thrusts energetically upward, but I can’t determine that it represents anything. jAbstract, comic-influenced design? If anything, it resembles an animated totem pole. A jagged cross-piece suggests the thunderbird and the pole’s unevenly linked segments suggest a totem’s stacked sections—but in motion, as if trying to escape each other.

On a round bench at the sculpture’s base, more travelers and families sprawl.

A woman in a full length, flowered raincoat, who looks very much like a shower curtain with arms, kisses her mustached husband goodbye—just a sweet smooch on the lips. She wipes a tear and watches him negotiate the cattle runs, his brown brimmed hat skimming like a pac-man icon above the ropes—across, back, across. Then, through the bars and toward the gate.

The flowered woman now pulls out a phone and makes a call—not completely forlorn after all. Meanwhile, a black family—man bearing toddler—enters the maze and then a young man with a woman his age in a wheelchair.

The woman in the flowered coat still gazes after her man. She is quite plump, so the coat swells around her like a mylar birthday balloon. she carries a plastic bag from Big and Atall.

As two janitorial workers pass, I decide it’s time to eat. A feat: I must gather too many wraps and bags and go to wash. As I cart my own necessities down the mall, the woman in the flowered coat heads out as well.

(It occurs to me this morning—now almost April—that the prison metaphor—the barred gates, the scrutiny is bizarre in the sense that this prison opens on both sides. Our careful scrutiny at this one station looks, from that viewpoint, almost pathetically innocent and optimistic. But perhaps other bars protect the passengers from the food-cart vendors, the crew and their encounters, the baggage handlers and the vast network of concrete runways that stretch in all directions toward low fences.)