I'm in transit. I'm
traveling
clear over to the other side of
the planet
from the amazing
Cowboy Cottage
in the
Napa Valley,
California's
wine country
in which I live, primarily to visit
my mother Andee
and to say goodbye to her for what may prove to be our last time as she
gets ready to leave
our world,
and secondarily to visit the rest of
my family
and old
friends
who live in Cape Town
South Africa.
It'll be a great,
straight,
no nonsense goodbye. I won't be hiring any choirs of angels, or
violins.
I haven't set foot inside the cabin of any airplane in two years. As I
was planning this visit, I wondered what to
expect
of latter day air
travel,
given what the
popular press
is saying about how
flying
has degraded. There may be some truth in what they say, there may not
be - I wouldn't know. That which I have heard however, is troubling
enough to have me
expecting
something arduous. What I never ever considered was what actually
happened:
an erstwhile frequent
flyer's
dream come
true.
The first leg of this two legged journey, was an eleven hour all night
trek from
San Francisco
California to München Germany. We departed exactly on time and
arrived exactly on time with no lines to
speak
of at either end, and minimal turbulence throughout the
flight.
Prior to boarding, I tried to
imagine
what it was going to feel like
sitting
up all night in a cramped seat with no leg room. How-ever
... that wasn't the reality of what I got. What I got was an entire row
of four empty seats for myself to stretch out on, each one of which was
enormous. There were lots of
free
movies with decent audio on a screen in the seatback in front of me,
not the neck-cricking overhead. I
watched
Fury, Gone Girl, and Jersey Boys, all of which were on my wish list,
and which were all well made - besides which, who doesn't
love
Frankie Valli?
There was WiFi on board. The food evoked a tasteful restaurant (what
was it the pundits were saying about airline food?). The eleven hours
flew
by (literally - no pun
intended).
The flight crew were
attentive
and totally great with us passengers. One of them, noticing I was
writing
on my laptop, offered unasked to recharge it for me in the galley if my
battery ran flat. Even though the battery in my new Lenovo
L440 will outlast an eleven hour
flight,
his generosity wasn't lost on me. I told him so.
Outdoors, München airport was cold: one degree below zero, snow
covering the concourse except the well used runways. But indoors I was
comfortable in shirtsleeves looking out onto the inclement weather. I
had a five hour layover for the München Cape Town leg, the second
eleven hour long haul in a row on Lufthansa. After I got caught
up on e-mail (München airport has blistering fast
free
WiFi), I took a long walk on the hour every hour through its many
vast
halls - might as well get exercise.
And now we're up in the air again, and I'm just
sitting
here enjoying the moment, staring out through the porthole onto the
inky
black
African sky. I've got
nothing going on.
The air is pregnant with possibility. The space up here
is the space of possibility. I have the space for anything to
come of this venture - anything at all, and
nothing
at all. I have the space for anything to
happen
here with anyone - including me. As the wise man has said "Anything
can
happen
... and probably will.".
There's
nothing
else left for me to do. My being herecompletes
it for me. I have no expectations about what can and / or what will
happen
in
South Africa.
Listen:
if there's ever been a country which has literally defied
expectations, it's
South Africa.
Here's an example which illustrates this well: I was there both on the
day
Nelson Mandela
was imprisoned, as well as on the day he was
freed
from prison. If you want a perfect dictionary definition of what simply
wasn't possible ie if you want the perfect dictionary
definition of that which was never going to
happen
ever and yet which defied all the expectations and
happened
anyway, I assert that epitomizes it.