Out of town

If I can manage to find some clean clothes to pack, and do the dishes so the friends who are coming to look after the cats don't think I'm a sloth, I am leaving in a little while for Martha's Vineyard. I took the picture above from an airplane window in October 2001, when I was coming home from Ghana.

I had been scheduled to fly a couple of days after 9/11, but apart from the fact that the airports were all closed, I wouldn't have wanted to fly then. I put my trip off for a couple of weeks. The scene at the airport was pandemonium. Long lines for luggage to be scanned -- it was the first time I realized that it actually wasn't, previously -- harried workers at the check-in counter, men with big guns. There was an irregularity with my ticket, since it was originally dated for a flight two weeks earlier, and the man at the check-in counter wasn't budging. I couldn't get on the flight that night. I tried pleading, "I'm sorry, but I did call the airline and they said it would be okay. Please, I have to get on that plane. Please, my city was attacked, I didn't know what to do."

"Her city was attacked," the man said to the woman next to him. "Her city. Do you hear that?"

OK, Mr. Lufthasana Man. Four years later, I apologize. It was your city, too. Maybe you knew some of the pilots or flight attendants on those crashed planes. But did you have to be so mean? I was the one, after all, who was going to have to get in the plane, not you.

After I talked to various managers, they decided to let me go. The two great things about flying right after 9/11 were that the flights were half empty, so I was able to sleep across five seats the entire way, and I had asked my doctor for ativan, so I was flying stoned. Ativan is a lovely drug; I don't know how I ever flew without it. I highly recommend it.