Up in the air

I used to hate flying: fear of death. Now, because I'm often flying to or from a catastrophe, I love it. I don't even mind the middle seat. The whole week I was at my parents' house, I looked forward to that ecstatic few hours when I would be free—free mostly of the fear that something would happen that would keep me there.

What with my sister-in-law's unsettled estate generating unexpected expenses, I get panic attacks about opening envelopes with a Massachusetts postmark. With my parents' failing health, I get panic attacks when I see the area code 415 in my caller i.d. And e-mail can bring bad news from both fronts. In the air, free from e-mail, snail mail and voicemail, I am unreachable.

(Sadly, my freedom was short-lived. I got home from San Francisco on Sunday at midnight. Tuesday my father had a fall, banged his head and generated such a bloodbath that the home-care agency called me at work. Somehow I wrassled my father into going to the VA emergency room, where they kept him till Friday. Somehow I failed to wrassle my mother into submission. I ordered full-time home care for her in my father's absence, and she canceled it. I ordered it again. She rebelled. Ach! How can I get any work done when the 'rents won't obey!)

When I was a child, I loved this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. And it has a bit of the cut-loose feeling I have about flying now:

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

River and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown--

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down!

Dealing with it

Sunday

Any attachment issues I may have been hauling got challenged before I left the ground. I suffer from fear of flying, so I'm careful to chose aisle seats. Window seats make me too aware of what's going on "out there." Can't bear to see the wing flaps, um, flap or actually witness that this great hulking mass of steel and human flesh has no sturdier support than air. But a large extended Indian family with many infants desired my seat, so I traded my aisle seat for … a window seat. I kept the shades drawn. The promised movie did not materialize. There was no food to be purchased. We arrived in Nassau on time, but could not deboard for over an hour because five other aircraft had landed at the same time. Customs, baggage check were both congested. When I got to the ashram, the promised single room had evaporated, and I was consigned to a double. The promised receipt for yoga classes (which my employer would partially reimburse) was refused. The "new guy" who had made both promises when I was making my reservation had made a mistake. No apologies. Deal with it. So I'm … dealing with it.