Thermal memories

I always feel a fool when I get off the plane in LA with my winter coat. It sits untouched in my hotel while I'm there. We natives nod to each other as we stuff them in the overhead, against flight crew instructions, on the way back East. But we know. 

I pre-heated my coat to about 5,000 degrees while we wait for the ground crew to figure out (is this their first time?) how to get us off the plane and into the terminal.

It's all so refined. Just a tiny gap between the fuselage and the air-bridge...but its enough. That one breath of sixteen degree air stings and delivers on all threats. You really might freeze.. you know..to death.. when you leave the building.

I did grow up with winter, with the cold, its smell, the way it tightens your skin and makes you move. As a kid the snow alters your ordinary world and makes just falling down more fun.

It is soothing to me now. It has a sameness and a quiet. A kind of pleasant isolation. Warm is after all just inside.

I actually like when these winter pictures come up on my  CEIVA at some un-wintery part of the year. They put me there. In that stillness for just a moment.

More on two places at once

Sometimes pictures and phone calls just aren't enough. You have to be there. For the ritual or the meal or the service or the sitting on the sofa - nothing but you in that room will complete the day.

As I get older I keep re-examining the who and the why of these fuel burning, hour-eating pilgrimages I make. Are they for me? Are they for people I love? Does anyone really care?? Am I such a curmudgeon even at 42 that I'd rather just stay home? Am I forcing worlds together that are so separated by distance that they really don't belong together?

I think I do it mostly now for my own inner peace. From all of the people I have brought or collected or joined together with after miles of travel and days of less comfort than sleeping in my own bed offers I will help to create a special moment. We share it now and will look back at it as the way we wanted to spend these 2008 holidays.

Someday the travel will fall to my kids.

"Catch that last flight to Dad's house for the holidays. He'll be so glad to see us and heart-broken if we don't come. It's where I belong on these special days."

The Holiday Shuffle

It’s 7:45 here in Burbank as I crawl to work on the 134. My mother’s voice comes to me from New York over cordless and cellular and Bluetooth through the traffic and directly into my head sounding every inch of the distance but it is her and she says she misses us.
The holidays are a California affair while Thanksgiving is back East but that doesn’t mean we don’t wish we could be in two places at once. As soon as I hang up I remember the new pictures of the kids in the hotel bathtub on my cell phone. A couple of clicks later it’s on its way to her CEIVA frame.

I am absolved.

I speak to my folks regularly, from wherever my travels take me. How I sound doesn’t matter to them compared to how I’m doing. The kids’ calls consist of lots of heavy breathing and “uh-huh” at this age though my twelve year old isn’t much better. Pictures are better.
CEIVA lets me poke a hole in the bathroom wall and show my mom the ordinary pieces of my life I wish she could be with us for every day.

She’ll call me tomorrow morning – just like she always does - when she gets the new picture on her frame. Then she’ll ask for more.