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Gray Matter
Travel is broadening—Among Other Things!
Each time I climb aboard a jet plane I am reminded how much I dislike modern travel. Approaching the gangway this time, I say: “I actually remember when flying was fun!”
“So do I,” the uniformed gal shoots back.
For me, it all began half a century ago. As a soldier-newsman with the Pacific Stars & Stripes I flew about the Japanese island nation, on prop planes, reporting GI sports. Meanwhile, on the Korean peninsula my readers were fighting, and dying, in a horrific war.
Later, as a magazine writer with the Saturday Evening Post, I traveled on jets to an Alaskan earthquake, the Nebraska panhandle, the historic Selma march and Washington, time and again, to cover politicians and other truth avoiders. These were the turbulent 1960’s and news gatherers were sorely challenged.
However, on this recent day my assignment was a happy one. I was bound for a pleasant Chicago suburb, where my only daughter Janet Ann awaited with her smiling munchkin. Miss Geneva is age 5. (Aside: it is my abiding regret all three adult Lindeman children have settled outside Chicago, in south Florida and Pasadena, CA. Grandpa Bard and Grandmother Jan, meantime, call Atlanta home.)
“It’s Geneva’s turn to see Grandpa,” came the family refrain and so, with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays drawing close, our intrepid traveler enters the busiest of all airports (Atlanta), bound for the next busiest (O’Hare).
Once through the airport doors, I am assaulted with sounds, and sights, and smells. People everywhere jabber into tiny cell phones: “I’m in the airport…in Atlanta,” is a popular bulletin. Who cares, buster?
It’s December; still, travelers walk past in sandals while women with abundant, naked midriff skin are also on parade. In my notebook, I scribble: “Who dresses these people? Sending them out looking like nightclub acts? Where was I when modesty was outlawed?”
I next endure the Security Ramble, struggling in and out of footwear. I then seek an island of quiet to read. Suddenly, a child erupts in a meltdown and I feel forced to relocate.
“See what you made the nice man do,” the mother scolds her child. I think: “No, Madame. Your inability to manage your offspring is what suggested I shift locales.”
Again, I turn to my notepad: “Air travel dictates a stripping away of civility…a complete reduction of all personhood. We travelers become faceless cargo…I become 36B, told to board with section five. Medallion holders sweep past, smug and favored!”
In Chicago, it is nine degrees. Everywhere, outdoor people wear wool masks, hiding bare skin and sour dispositions. Who can blame them, in weather suitable for fur-blessed animals? I am greeted, however, by granddaughter Geneva, with her adoring father, Greg Domantay, a distance runner extraordinaire now committed to making his tot’s life blessed.
Gentle Geneva presents me with a homework drawing, signed in love. Now, all inconveniences seem trivial in retrospect. Next, I find myself downtown in a tower dedicated to commerce. Twenty stories above North LaSalle Street I command a view of the city, yet my eyes belong only to my daughter, a blonde in black who at age 43 is the epitome of the woman who does it all: real estate lawyer, wife, mother, Pilates (pih-LAH-teez) advocate and fitness devotee.
Together, we walk the floor where I meet three male co-workers. Each, unsolicited, says: “Janet is a great lawyer…she’s my favorite partner…a fine person.” So, proud and warmed to the gills, I head out for wind-whipped Michigan Avenue to lunch with a former colleague. “What cold?” I ask myself.
“Journeys are the essential text of the human experience,” writes Susan Orlean in “My Kind of Place” (Random House; 2004), “The journey from birth to death, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end.”
Thirty-five years ago, on a September night burned into my consciousness, Janet’s mother died in an Oak Park, IL hospital, of virulent, and fatal, peritonitis. Janet was eight, suddenly bereft: abandoned. To see her today, in command of her environment, and exhibiting a discipline that is almost martial, is to know the pride of a single parent.
As a septuagenarian, I persist in my aversion to jet travel, yet along with author Mary Pipher I submit that while families are imperfect institutions, they remain “our greatest source of meaning, connection and joy.”
Watching Geneva toss back her head, laugh loudly and snuggle Grandma Jan is to understand: “Everyone needs kin.”
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Outrageous Associations
