Snowbound?

Here in Salt Lake City a fat wallop of snow has arrived to smack everyone on the chin, and this on the year’s second heaviest travel day.It was just ten degrees here when our plane landed Thursday night and it’s still mighty chilly now. My girl Annie has been staying in the new-baby house all this time while I have been billeted in a motel so spartan its wee kitchen offers just two cups, two bowls, three each in the spoon-fork-knife department  and maybe ¼ of an ounce of dishwashing liquid in a small foil packet.But hey the fridge works, sort of, and the toaster at least warms up your bread if it doesn’t exactly brown it and they say  an actual Whole Foods lies just over yonder. So if it turns out I’m marooned here I guess I can always trudge over there  in the my ridiculous old fur coat, brought along just in case. I look like the Abominable Snowman in it I know but I bought it 20 years ago  both because it was seriously on sale and so I could have something warm to wrap my children in that Christmas when at my INSANE suggestion, we took the train from Boston Massachewsetts clear to Tampa F-L-A, chased the whole way down by a cold snap so severe it made black wilted spinach of all their lush vegetation.Glad I was for this coat on that train I can tell you, especially when in classic Amtrak style the cars went cold, the water in the johns all froze, and our kids began throwing up one after another on entering them, first at the smell of the unflushed waste and then at the sight of each other throwing up but let me not go there now. Instead let the God of All Travel shine his light on all those trying to get home safe today. Annie and I don’t fly ‘til tomorrow and I know I’ll be fine here  even if the kids can’t come get me today in all these veils of white. That Whole Foods is just past a few dumpsters, across a right-of-way and through several hundred yards of parking lot where I can find  a wealth of soy flour, and wheat bran, and kelp sprouts if there even is such a thing as kelp sprouts.

me in my old fur coat

US Scare

Just flew back across country on US Scare and would not have been surprised to see people holding chickens in their laps, it felt that primitive. By which I mean:No movie. Maybe we all got spoiled with the movies but a six-hour trip with not even the distraction of a safety video?No food. Well, no complimentary food. They have big signs saying “You’d better buy it now!” outside the gates but my guys didn’t realize. (I myself always travel with my own food which embarrasses them no end. It’s not the entrees, it’s the cutlery I think.)An odd sort of flight attendant, like the one who came pushing along the food cart just after takeoff. He barreled down the aisle saying “Food? Food?”, not individually but in a kind of Greek chorus voice meant for all. “What have you got?” asked the woman beside me. “Well it’s all right here!” huffed the guy as if we had X-ray vision and could see through the cart’s steel sides. And…The bathroom got into trouble and nobody fixed it. Enough said there.The whole experience reminded me of the time we took the train from Boston to Tampa one frigid winter and the cold followed us the whole way like a yelping bloodhound. There was that same kind of mute suffering then. The cars were freezing and somebody threw up in the bathroom which of course caused other people to throw up when they came upon the mess. Then the sinks stopped working. “The sinks don’t work! I think the pipes all froze!” I said, near tears, to the conductor. This was when we were just north of into DC.  “Oh ya,” he said. “But they’ll thaw once we hit Georgia.”I was a wreck during that trip and I was wreck during this one. Plus I just found out from my friend Scott that he flew across the country this past weekend too but he flew Jet Blue, so doubtless paid less AND he got a movie. Just sayin’. I won’t ever try going from A to B with these guys again; I’ll take a rickshaw first.