Or wherever your travels may take you--

Landing in Dallas:Looking out as the plane hovers closer and closer to the ground at the layers of spotty clouds around us. There is a sheet of rain just to the left of the plane that literally falls in a wedge to the ground, plastering one area of town while the rest seems clear. Once we get there, the runway and parking lots near the airport are slick with rainwater, but no drops are falling. As we pass over a lake, we can see tiny white specks of birds against the blue green of the water and whitecaps appearing briefly and then gone. You wouldn't think you could see the birds from so far up, but there they are, and you can make out the pattern of flight as they swoop and fall on wind currents, using the same principals of flight that keep your small airplane afloat.

A perfect circle of a little neighborhood, white streets etched into the green grass around, and a "t" of a cross street dissecting the circle. Matchbox cars, trucks, a big trailer park-- they are so tiny as to not look real, but you imagine the people still sleeping (it is very early in the morning, still, and you've been up for hours) or moving about their morning routine groggily.

For just a second, a single spear of lightning pierces the layer of rain to the left of the plane. It is far enough away to be unthreatening to your tiny plane, but startling in its vivid white line.

As I looked out the window as we began to come nearer to the ground, gravity starting to feel stronger and pull the engines into a higher pitch, I spotted a marquee digital sign, seemingly far away from the huge parking lot where it sat, and it flashed a message, readable from the air, saying "Welcome Back." It almost was speaking to me, I felt-- like that magic traffic advisory sign in the movie L.A. Story and I couldn't help but smile and feel personally welcomed. After four days with my very "smoker" oriented family, and me a very "non-smoker", I am happy to be "almost back" because the cigarette smoke still clings to my hair, and clothes, and I can't wait to be smoke free again. They are considerate, and try to limit the cigarettes when I am in an enclosed spaces with them, but it still makes my head pound to be there.

There were guys on the early morning plane, a small one with probably about 20 seats, tops, who were snotty and thought it was very funny to mock the flight attendant's safety briefing. They had tons of luggage clustered around their feet and she told them they had to move these bags because the row must be clear. They acted like they couldn't wait the five minutes (tops) it takes to get one's bags at the planeside and it was such an inconvenience to put their bags somewhere other than at their feet. To me, it is much more uncomfortable to sit for an hour and a half with one's feet on one's luggage, and I hate trying to wrestle my carry on in and out of the overhead bins. But these guys thought they were the cleverest fellas in history-- mocking the info about how to fasten the seatbelts and how the drop down oxygen system would work. Of course we all know how to use a seatbelt, idiots. But the briefing is there because in a survivable emergency, the only things you're going to remember are those things that are so drilled into your head that it is rote memory that you perform the actions that save your life. It's like people who crash into bodies of water (like a lake) in their car and die because they can't get out-- only because they forget to remove their seatbelts in their panic.

But then there was the friendly older gentleman, leaning against a short wall, and when I got to the gate, a little rushed and needing breakfast, to find that I had plenty of time cause the plane was not loading yet after all, who smiled and said in his gruff voice "It's like the Army; hurry up and wait."

And the simple joy of getting a strawberry yogurt layered with granola and fresh fruit to take with me on the flight. And a cup of fresh morning coffee with two Splendas and two half n halfs.

Watching the hopping brown sparrows with nests in the eaves of the airport who swoop at the windows and peck the ground near the planes, to be chased off by harried baggage handlers. Original aviators who like the airport as home instead of the green of a suburban tree bank.

The pretty, constantly smiling flight attendant, with short curly hair and chocolate smooth skin, who could have been a model and seemed genuinely happy to be there and whose eyes crinkled each time she spoke-- true joy in life that is so much more genuine than the sarcastic mocking of the (earlier mentioned) passengers from the seat behind.

The crankiness and constantly loud phone conversation of a pair of businessmen near the back of the plane who can't even take 35 minutes of flight between Dallas and San Antonio to rest and think of things other than the meeting ahead.

Most of all, the pleasure in Andrew's voice that I was already almost home when I called him from my seat (2C).


Glad to be home, and having traveled too much lately-- the novelty of constant flight is worn a little thin, and the same time that I can still find something new and interesting each time.