Airport Bar

Friday, Oct. 29, 2010-12:27 pm
AIRPORT BAR

I�ve always loved the way life slows down and everything falls into perspective when the unexpected happens .During the recent hurricane Earl hysteria , for a few days no one cared about Trans fats, sharks, encephalitic mosquitos or what Brittany Spears or Tiger Woods is doing.

When you are stranded a the airport, you can observe the same phenomenon.
You can get insight into a person's true nature by how they react when a flight is substantially delayed . Last Christmas I went to spend a few days with Jay in Miami. There had been a major snow storm in the Northeast , wreaking havoc with the flight schedules from the Canadian border to the Equator..

He dropped me off at the airport for my flight home. I found out, after I got through security, that my flight was delayed 3 hours. I was not entirely sanguine with it, but I didn't bother to call and insist that Jay come all the way back to the airport, interrupt his plans and wait with me. I didn't hang around the terminal, frustrated, like the other irate passengers. This may be completely at odds with contemporary thought but there was nothing I could do about this unexpected inconvenience except watch as the world slowed down. I decided to have a glass of wine at the airport bar and relax..

There was music playing in the airport bar, comfortable seats and better lighting. I settled in and enjoyed three hours with nothing to do but drink, and enjoy whatever the small screen of my iPod had to offer...

Jay will always be "my metaphorical airport bar" and I, will be his. He is the best person with whom I would want to ride out a troubled time. We were each others' first call. The first one with whom we shared good or bad news . We have seen each other through a number of disastrous work experiences, family crises , and a few health scares.

Right now he was in an intangible dilemma that even his "airport bar" couldn't mitigate.
Being stuck for days in Paris , riding out a transit strike, may sound idyllic .
In reality it was subversive , involuntary captivity.

Popular imagination assumes that Paris is one big fashionable place where every name you care to drop from the twentieth century hip scene ,( from Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, D.H. Lawrence , to Thelonious Monk,) all lived together in a a trendy rooming house on the Champs-�lys�es from 1929 until the end of the Vietnam War . It was never as glamorous as that, and certainly was not now. There were no Chanson Fran�aise in triple time rhythm played on the accordion on every street.

It was unexpectedly difficult for him to be back there after all these years, aside from the delay. The itinerary had been designed to be a one night Paris stopover. It was inevitably a return to something deep and unresolved. He told me how he was uneasy in the presence of his mother's aura. Years before he had come here to bring her home from the place where she had left this earth. I listened with empathy, but I couldn't truly comprehend the magnitude of what it was like.

Whatever it was I said to him, on the echoed long distance call, whatever I wrote , would be inadequate and simplistic. I said the words that I knew , and hoped they were not delivered like a script. Like words I learned to say but ad no idea of their meaning. Words are inadequate. Words also have a lot of power. Words can create good feelings, heal, encourage, discourage , build up, tear down, cause insecurity , change lives, or destroy someone's ego, cause people to lose jobs.
Words can also be annoying.

I took the risk and said them anyway. When we hung up the phone, and I imagined him turned to the window , looking out at the City of Lights again in overwhelmed silence.

Life is composed of certain basic elements. � birth, death, love and beauty . We're flawed because we want so much more, and even when we get these things we wish for something better. We all have the choice to live life to the fullest or to carry our pain with us. If we allow its burden to define us, that is is to compromise our own worth. No one's mother would want them to do that, in a misguided intention to honor their memory.

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