Two Wednesdays

Wednesday #1:

I woke at six and groped my way through the dark house to the bathroom, then to the kitchen. Harry and Sheleigh and the dogs, Geordie and Molly, slept on in their room, while I washed up and ate a bowl of muesli in the quiet.

With some reluctance I shouldered my pack and made my way down the hall to the front door. I hesitated to close the door behind me, thinking, did I forget anything? and, more, do I really want to leave? I didn't, but I had a plane to catch.

I walked down dark Railway Place to the small end-of-the-line train station, where I arrived six minutes before the next departure. I bought my ticket and joined a couple other sleepy people on the platform.... Soon we were headed towards the city, stopping periodically to take on new passengers. At Southern Cross station I walked to the Skybus stop and within a few minutes was on the way to the airport. Bit by bit Australia was falling away from me.

I checked my backpack, paused at an "Australiana" store to buy two over-priced kangaroo pens for Naomi and Alix, and then abandoned my jar of peanut butter after making a sandwich with two pieces of bread I'd spirited out of Harry and Sheleigh's house. I passed through security and right into the department store-like duty-free area, where the air was oppressively redolent with the odors of competing perfumes. Other early morning travelers spritzed the testers onto their inner wrists, or perused the shelves of a little-bit-less-expensive liquor. With plenty of time before boarding, I moved slowly. All was taken care of now; I was ready to go but then again not so ready. I wanted to go home, but I didn't want to leave Australia.

At my window seat, 48A (two rows behind the dreaded 46: see flight out), I found an ample pillow, a blanket in plastic wrap, a set of headphones, and a small zipped packet which contained a pair of gray socks, a lanyard, a sleep mask, and a toothbrush with a wee tube of toothpaste. Combine these items with my own bottle of water, Trollope and Pritchett, notebook, gum for take off and landing, and I was all set to sit still in a very small space for the next fourteen hours. After take-off, when the seatbelt light went out, the man next to me in the middle seat (who had already shown he was willing to spread out into my space) moved to another seat, so life was pretty goo, relatively speaking.

The woman in the aisle seat in my row drank one small bottle of wine after another during the flight, starting as soon as we took off at eleven in the morning. With each new bottle she would scan a small menu and then consult at length with a flight attendant--her sommelier--before making a selection.

For lunch I was inexplicably brought a diabetic meal. I think I might have asked for vegetarian when I booked the ticket months ago, but there was meat so apparently diabetic isn't veg. Towards the end of the flight my breakfast was the same, which meant I got no fried potatoes or bread and my eggs were hard-boiled. After lunch ice cream bars were distributed, and my acceptance of the bar went unquestioned. A bit later, just before the interior lights were shut off in an attempt to fool our bodies into thinking it was bedtime, the flight attendants passed out small bags, each with a bottle of water, fruit bar, cookies and mints--snacks to tide us over through the "night," and with which the flight attendants were saying, "go to sleep now and leave us alone, we're through with you for the time being."

I spent a half hour paging through the dozens of television and movie options, available for viewing on the small screen in the seat back in front of me. Eventually I settled on Iron Man, which I'd heard was good but wasn't particularly. Well, entertaining, I suppose, but lame. I did like Robert Downey, Jr. Later, after some recovery time with Trollope, I watched The Savages (chosen from the "alternative" category), which was much better though a little bleak. Philip Seymour Hoffman was excellent, but then he usually is. Last, at the end of the flight, I watched episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, as means of re-acclimating to the United States.

On the long flight I also slept some, pondered a bit. A flight home always renders me contemplative. It's a time for casting back over recent experience, taking stock, a pause before the return to the familiar.

Many people on the plane (though not the crew) were speaking American--which I'm afraid sounded harsh and unpleasant. We're too insistent on all the consonants. Soon, I knew, no one would call me "Cappa."
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Wednesday #2:

I landed at LAX just before eight in the morning and quickly passed through Customs (where my passport was not stamped, which is a loss, I think). I picked up my backpack at the baggage carousel, and then at a second checkpoint an agent re-checked my passport and glanced at the customs card I'd filled out. "You have food?" he asked. I had indeed checked "yes" to that question, but only after an initial "no" that I crossed out, deciding not to lie after all. I answered his question, understating my stash--"just a couple granola bars"--and he waved me past without another word. I didn't see anyone having their belongings searched, though there had been a small beagle sniffing at bags by the carousel. Apparently it was not trained to detect Australian nut bars.

Outside the terminal I stepped into a sunny, cool but humid morning. Summer again after five weeks of winter (well, winter of a sort). Soon James arrived and he drove me back to his house in Long Beach before going on to work. His ten-year-old son, Jordan, was home, and we chatted for a few minutes and then he went back to playing his video game, "Knights of the Republic" (or something like that), part of the Star Wars empire. Through the morning he alternated between the video game, building elaborate lego structures, and watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, each activity undertaken in a different room of the house. He's a quiet and appealing boy, well-mannered, of slight build and freckled all over. He was willing to talk when I had questions for him, willing to quietly entertain himself when I was done.

I wandered about the house, went through my stuff, ate the usual bowl of muesli.... I felt dazed by the rapid transport of my body halfway around the world. I'd left Melbourne at eleven on a Wednesday morning, arrived in L.A. at eight on the same Wednesday morning. Well, supposedly the same. I was discombobulated by lack of sleep, by displacement, by the geographic and cultural change....

Later Brendon, James' older son, came home from cross-country practice, sweaty and lean. The kid--he's seventeen--must have about one percent body fat, if that. He's middle-sized and freckled like his brother, polite but distracted.

Trish his mother came home and wanted to hear everything about Australia, and I told her stuff, but soon we fell into conversation about books, as we do, being fellow former English majors. She was telling me about Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels when I realized I'd seen the movie version last spring, which led us to take up the lovely relationship between the young boy in the story and the Greek man who rescues him from the Nazis. Less appealing was a book--I can't remember the title--that Trish was reading for her book club. It was poorly written and trite, she said, and she objected to the repeated Evangelical-bashing engaged in by the characters. Trish is a devout Christian and was offended. So later when I inadvertently added a "for Chrissakes" to a sentence I spoke, I immediately afterwards felt bad, though she hadn't flinched.

Trish is careful about her own language, substituting euphemisms in the places where swear words go. Usually she's much too nice and upbeat to have need even of the replacements, but when angered she will use "flipping" to express her outrage or displeasure. She's also quite articulate, apparently as a result of all her reading, using words like "eschew" and "disparage" and "egregious," and doing so without self-consciousness or affect.

Our book talk made her fifteen minutes late for an appointment at Traffic School, and they locked the doors on her. She was angry and felt ill-used, and when she got home and told us about what had happened she had recourse to use "flipping." She said she'd been to Traffic School many times before, and if you were late they usually just made you stay an extra fifteen minutes or whatever it was.

But her tardiness was to my benefit, as she brought dinner home with her and spent the evening with myself and James and the boys. She walked in with a big bag of California Pizza Kitchen items, and out back on the patio we ate pizza and southwestern salad and Thai salad and lettuce wraps. Jordan sang a song he and his friends had made up when being ferried to some activity in a van, and we talked about his coming week at a camp on Catalina Island.

After dinner, the family politely asked to see my Australia photos, and though there were too many, they attended with apparent interest, even the boys, though Jordan did wander towards the end, and I thought, yes, you're right, enough of this. Then the boys played a game of Risk on the floor, while James and I watched the second half of an episode of Project Runway, and in another room Trish watched one of the modeling competition reality shows. It all felt very homey and comfortable and American.

I slept in Jordan's room, while Jordan shared Brendon's large bed. Legos and lego structures were scattered about the room; in the night I rose to go to the bathroom and knocked a Darth Vader helmet from the bedpost, probably waking the whole house.