Reading: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Moving: the airport hustle

8 September 2001: Denver to Newark

The frontispiece of my Europe journal:

Here are two things that made me think of you in Europe. Someday you must go, I think you'll get as much out of the experience as I have--you really learn a lot about people, countries, and especially yourself--traveling gives you the time and distance to do some good thinking.

Enjoy your last semester at school (for a while) and come visit soon

(The other thing was how my name means that the hedgehog (sorry, Kymm) and the valerian are my animal totem and flower motif.)

The blank, lined, book with a cover of marbled colors has sat on various bookshelves for over ten years. My sister's note is dated 10/3/90.

On 8 September 2001 I finally began to write in it. As I transcribe from it now, trying to make sense of notes scrawled in a hurry, jotting what I saw where, the period of a particular sculpture in the British Museum or whatever, it is 25 September 2001, two weeks After. I write, and put it in context, so that I don't forget.

---

9:00 DIA Red Carpet Club

Our cabbie reeked in that stale way, badly; and mumbled continuously as if speaking in tongues, like Poisonwood Bible's Methuselah. But here we are.

Today is rainy and foggy but at least not snowy; thunderstorms had been a possibility. Yesterday dawned positively freezing, in the low 50s, and damp, but over the moutnains I saw clear sky, and by 9:00 the entire front had cleared and the whole rest of the day was just perfect--low 70s, warm in the sun, chilly in the breeze, blue all the way to the horizon.

For the trip, I have the last quarter of 2000 and 2001 by Anna to read, and the latest Newsweek (cover story on Mormons). I also have Midnight's Children and Poisonwood Bible to read. I left behind Galileo's Daughter, The Biographer's Tale (still), and The Book on the Bookshelf. Here's the deal, OMFB, no new Jean Auel until I have read The Biographer's Tale. By the time the next Earth's Children is released next May, I shall have owned the Byatt for nearly two years, so that seems a fair deal.

1:45 pm
Although post-whose-meridian I know not.

In the air, bound for Newark, after a 2.5 hour period of frustration, bad weather, and faulty windshield wipers. We were meant to fly into La Guardia and switch to JFK, and now we're flying in and out of Newark, which is excellent because a) we're not in Denver waiting for a plane with working wipers and b) we don't have to switch airports. RDC wanted to take one big suitcase and a carryon apiece but acquiesced to my suggestion of a small wheelie and carryon apiece, and now gratefully, because if we had a checked the monster case, we'd be stuck on the original, busted plane with it, instead of being able to hop across the concourse to the Newark flight, upon which he was able to get us with his superduper finagling.

I'm reading Poisonwood Bible and not liking the oldest daughter, Rachel, as much as I like the book as a whole. Part of it is her language, which I hope for Kingsolver's sake is deliberate.

My seatmate just said, "They all say that" when I rolled my eyes at a screaming baby and he guessed I didn't have any "yet." "Not any ever," I corrected him, whereupon he leapt to his "they all." Otherwise he's quite nice. He was delighted to switch when we established that I prefer a window to an aisle seat and he vice versa, and we've been chatting amiably over the empty seat between us. Pat from San Francisco, going on to visit friends in New York after a week in Vail.

25 September: I don't know when he planned to return to California! He said a long weekend in New York! There was a Patrick Driscoll on flight 93 from Newark to SFO, no age or city.

Well. That's put another damper on this project. It is improbable that my seatmate wound up on Flight 93, but I should like to know Patrick Driscoll's age and city.

When passengers from the La Guardia flight began their exodus, I noticed one passenger who was also vying for a seat on this Newark-bound flight (which, not incidentally, happens to connect to Heathrow with the same flight number, though not the same plane): gorgeous, long-haired, exactly scruffy enough, oo la.

See what I mean about how even more trivial all this is?

RDC and I both got on this flight, though separated. I'm with a nice older gent also from the LaGuardia flight who first exclaimed at my bendiness when I folded myself up to allow him into his window seat, and then appreciated my offer to swap my aisle for his window. He reads: Poisonwood Bible, Longest Day [the movie of which I'm listening to in the background as I type this, 25 September] Into Thin Air, Into the Wild (which he didn't like: too padded, too personal, should have stayed an Outside article), Bill Bryson, Under a Tuscan Sun. His name is Pat, and so afterward when I said RDC was from Orange (Connecticut) and bemoaned that as an unfortunate name, he laughed. He might be Someone, because on the LaGuardia flight he was in first class.

Anyway, RDC came back from Economy Plus before this Newark flight departed to tell me we were booked through to Heathrow, whew. When Pat got up to pee, I scampered forward to say hi to RDC. Whose seatmate (his middle seat is also empty) is Mr. Hair. But the eye candy is probably not as affable or as pleasant a conversationalist as Pat, and staring's rude.

The in-flight movie "Moulin Rouge" instead of "Dr. Dolittle 2." So I've stopped reading. I'm so bad. But flights are no good for reading anyway.

And I like MR even without Haitch, even in a plane version.

Adah in Poisonwood Bible reads backward like Ynot Tnomerf. This must be a good omen.

Of the book, presumably.

Hearing "Roxanne" in MR, writing in a blank book with a cover like this one's, I don't think that was just a moment of déjà vu. I think I dreamed it.

Also Pat recommends a movie called "Lamumba" or something. I didn't want to ask him to repeat himself more than twice, but I don't think I have the name yet and all I can think is "La Bamba."

Margaret Atwood's Tony didn't have such brilliant palindromes as Adah. Tony only writes backward. But Adah writes "Amen enema."

I just looked in my digital catalog to see whether I took a photograph of Manhattan last December. Flying from Dulles to Boston, we had a great view of lower Manhattan from the left side of the plane. I was all over the place, looking out of windows, because the flight was nearly empty and I could. One hundred miles later I was on the right side to take pictures of Old Lyme. But I didn't take a picture of Manhattan that day. Nor did I take a picture of Manhattan, this time through the starboard windows, as we approached Newark. Should've, of course. But the first picture I took from this trip is of southwestern English countryside.

1:00 am GMT, though still 8:00 pm EDT
And I don't know why they call it "mean" time when England observes stupid Daylight Savings Time too.

Here we are, with the plane in the air and everything. After stress at the strong chance of missing our limited time, and frustration at United workers' inability to tell the complete truth or useful fraction of it, and having been booked on four flights, here we are. It turns out that if we'd made our original flight on time, we might not have made our connection anyway: the U.S. Women's Open (tennis) is happening in Queens tonight, last night, and it's likely three hours would not have been enough to get from LGA to JFK.

I have taken two kava kava that allegedly will relax me. A nice man in the middle seat (there are five) swapped his seat with RDC so we're together.

Redeeming her colleagues, the attendant who asked the fellow to swap so we could sit together offered us the two right seats, window and aisle only, that earlier had been referred to as crew seats. We have footrests, lumbar support, and a bit more room.

There is an infant that looks like it's younger than six months old who, the father alleges, is making its sixteenth transatlantic trip. It ought to have learned by now to shut up, then, right? And why ever would someone think a baby needs to go back and forth so often? Babies and their warders should be seated in the back of the plane, to board first so they take more time to settle in, and where it's louder anyway so the engine's sound might cancel out the babies' wails.

I am not sleepy yet. A wonder: it's 4:30 p.m. in my body. At 2:30 I could nap easily. But I had best try.

---

28 September:

I was glad to see land underneath me, though I groused at RDC for rousing me from fitful sleep. English countryside: one day I will do a walking tour of it.

Minutes later we were over London. The trip had not felt real to me until I bought the tickets for the Globe, but I was still in Denver when I did that. This, now, underneath me, was London (Heathrow is west of London proper and we'd had to circle). This was real. Those green bits are, west to east, left to right, Hyde Park, the Green Park (Anne's friend Diana must have made up that name), St. James. Just on the river side of St. James, the House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the tower of Big Ben. The Millennium Wheel. If I'd been faster, I would have had St. Paul's and the Tower in this shot as well.

We were there. We were here.