Archives December 2021

Into the Light

It had been over two years since I had flown, a full six months before the pandemic hit. So, with my kids spending the week at their mom’s and me “flying solo,” I decided to fly for real to spend the holiday with my dad in his retirement community near Tampa. No offense to anyone from Florida, but it’s not my favorite place in the world, so I decided to do something different this time. Let’s face it, we’ve been in lockdown now going on two years, but to me every day has felt like March 3, 2020, the day I found out my office was going 100% remote—the day the isolation began.

I’ve always wanted to check out Savannah, Georgia, as it’s a very old and unique southern city that was originally founded as a utopian community in 1733 by one James Oglethorpe who set rules that included, among other things, no slavery and no lawyers, but more on that in a future post. Conveniently, the city just happens to be within driving distance of my dad’s place. With that, my plan was hatched. I would fly into Savannah for two days, rent a car for twenty-four hours to drive to my dad’s, then fly out of Tampa back home to Seattle.

Now, I’m not one to skimp on things that matter, and if I had been traveling with my kids, I would have certainly chosen better flights, but since I was solo, I opted to save a bunch of money by choosing pretty much the worst red-eye flights in the history of red-eye flights. With the money I saved, I booked a room at a historic bed and breakfast called the Eliza Thompson House, built in 1847, which turned out to be awesome! (More to be written on that in a future post.)

As with all journeys, they never go exactly the way you expect. My initial flight departed Seattle a full two hours late, causing me to miss my ungodly 7:00 a.m. connection at JFK. The next flight they could put me on departed at 3:55 p.m., leaving me with about eight hours to sit around between flights. I thought about waiting at the airport so I wouldn’t have to go back through security but decided to “screw” that thought . . . life’s too short. With my decision made, I strode out of the secure area, committing myself to whatever came next.

I boarded the AirTrain light-rail system, hopped off at the actual NYC metro station, and was immediately proud of myself for knowing how to purchase a card for a bona fide subway system (Seattle’s light rail is only about a hundred years behind the Northeast’s. . . . Yes, I’m a subway snob. I’m from Boston, what can I say?) Still basking in the warm glow of my victory over the forces of the card machine, I stepped up to the turnstile, fumbled with my card . . . and got stuck. I slid the card forward, backward, upside down, and inside out, but nothing happened. I was, however, particularly successful at looking like a complete moron. To add icing to the “imbecile cake,” when I finally did get it right, I almost missed getting through the turnstile, not realizing that I had a limited amount of time to actually push through the gate. A good Samaritan brusquely ushered me through, with a verbal “Go, man!”

Feeling like I had safely crossed the border into another country, I hurried down the worn granite steps toward the platforms. Two tunnels cut across a large, low-ceilinged room. Red and white tiles on the walls formed arrows indicating which way the trains traveled and spelled out the name of the stop, which I have since forgotten. To be fair, I’d only had about two hours of sleep and was lucky I could even remember my own name. Heavy steel supports, spread out every ten feet, formed a metal forest through which I could see dozens of fellow travelers, the tunnels, and the approaching trains. I didn’t have long to wait before the telltale vibrations of an oncoming subway shook the platform. Getting on the subway was easy now that I’d mastered the mystical art of swiping the metro card. I have to say, I really miss those old coin tokens; they made more sense, plus they were just cool.

It had been years since I’d ridden an actual subway; in fact, I’m not even sure when the last time was. I suppose it was in San Francisco riding the “Muni,” and maybe the “T” in Boston before that. Subways are fun, and as a total history geek, I’m especially interested in them and trains in general. (Sidenote: sections of Boston’s subway lines, dating back to a horse-drawn railcar system from the mid-1800’s, are still in use. Crazy, right?) Once I had settled into my seat, the doors slid shut, and the train jerked forward. I thought, Now would be a good time to figure out where the hell I’m actually going. I had several interesting options, including Penn Station and the World Trade Center. I thought about trying to hit a museum, but with only four hours, I didn’t really have enough time to do much, given that it took about forty-five minutes to get from the airport to Manhattan and back again. I landed on the Penn Station stop for nostalgic reasons.

When I was twelve, living in Boston, my mother had taken me and my siblings on a cross-country rail trip. Penn Station had marked the end of the first leg and the beginning of the second of that adventure. I managed to stay mostly conscious as the train bumped along, despite having barely secured three hours of sleep on the plane. I dozed several times but was awake enough to disembark at the correct stop. With the train behind me, I hurried across the station and up the stairs toward the surface. It had been twenty-eight years since I’d set foot in Manhattan. Once at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, I realized I still had the ticket stub from that prior visit to one of the World Trade Center Tower’s observation decks. I paused for a moment, put my hand to the tiled wall, closed my eyes, and offered a quick nondenominational prayer to those who perished on 9/11. I took a long, slow breath, nodded, and continued. The stairs rounded a corner, and a blinding white glow washed over me from the opening to the street above. It felt cinematic, and I could almost hear a dramatic soundtrack ringing in my ears as I stepped into the light.