Saturday, March 10, 2012

Lift-Off

            Sitting here, at Gate B-26 in Terminal 4 of John F. Kennedy International Airport, I am so glad I brought food.  I am enjoying a pistachio muffin, which may seem like a strange thing to eat at 7 o'clock in the evening, but i am on the "Jet Lag Diet", and a small snack of carbohydrates is on the bill.  My muffin is also a brilliant shade of green, which seems appropriate for an Aer Lingus flight to Dubin, particularly with Saint Patrick's Day a week away. 

               Jet lag or no jet lag, I always bring food on any kind of long voyage.  I was converted to this philosophy by a friend of mine, who wisely pointed out it made traveling more civilized, especially now that many airlines charge considerable sums for mediocre offerings, with the free meals uninspiring as well.

            Airports, too, are not places to eat, although many make a greater effort to offer sandwiches, pizzas, even caviar and champagne.  The cost of these are often so high that the anxiety I normally feel approaching a flight is magnified by seeing that the price of one of Wolfgang Puck's pizzas has set me back twenty dollars. 

            As a friend of mine said, flying has to be approached the way hibernation in a cave would be: you bring all you need to survive the winter and hunker down in your self-created cave, laptop with music, noise-reducing headphones (if you can afford them and do not mind carrying them around just for a flight), sleep mask, neck pillow and fleece blanket.

            Nonetheless, the prospect of traveling continues to excite me, and being at the airport, having successfully cleared security (after a full body frisk because I do not want to take in the radiation of a full-body scan)  is confirmation of my competence.

            "Why Do The Wrong People Travel?" laments Noel Coward, "When the right people stay at home?"  The screaming babies, the older couples who do not travel frequently and as a result, find the experience nothing but a series of mystifying hurdles, the burnt-out "road warriors", travel means none of this to me.  I try to individualize my experience, even as I recognize that I am just one of tens of thousands in the airports of the country, let alone millions around the world.  The assertion of my individual identity as a traveler that knows how to travel makes me calmer, more ready to mount the skies, even as I admit that I am a nervous flyer, with an irrational dislike of planes.  Yet I must travel, and traveling today usually involves flying, so I have developed these strategies to cope: bringing my own food, packing smartly, trying to make sitting in economy as luxurious an experience as possible by bringing my favorite perfume in sample-sized containers, cutting a figure with my rhinestone-studded reading glasses, even if I am wearing hiking boots.  At the ready is my sleep mask in a battle-fatigues print, made by "Forty Blinks".  Before boarding I brush my teeth assiduously.  Called for boarding and walking over to seat 42C, I sink into my seat and slip it over my eyes.  The flight is only six hours long, not a moment to lose.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Terra Firma

     No one is sitting in the seat next to me, and I have an aisle seat, which works out to give me room to tuck my legs under and even settle, rather than remaining rigidly in my seat.  I toss and turn a bit, and I get up and walk around twice, but at some point I am out cold, and I awake only 30 minutes before landing.

     I am thirsty, and I don't know whether breakfast has been served.  I walk to the back of the plane and penetrate the cabin crew's inner sanctum, curtained off.  I request some juice, which the stewardess, a little testy, interrupts her inventory of duty-free sales to get.  She hands me a tiny can of ginger ale, and returns to her count.  I wonder whether it is the brevity of the flight that makes the service seems so hectic or is this the Aer Lingus flight style?  I will be passing through here again on May 31, and again on June 11, so I will be better able to judge later.

     Immigration goes smoothly, the personnel being very friendly.  I am given a stamp for a connecting flight and directions to the corridor for these.  I walk there and am met by an agent who asks me whether I had a good flight.  When I say I have, he says "Grand!"    I am in Ireland, without a doubt.

     I present a bit of a problem when I say I want to go to Mass at Our Lady Queen Of Heaven at the airport at 10:00 a.m.  The agent explains that I have been stamped for a connecting flight, when to go to the church I need to leave the airport, which requires a different entry stamp.  He escorts me back to the same smiling immigration officer who stamped my passport previously, explaining what I want to do.  She has no problem with it, merely cancels out her previous notation on my passport, and stamps it to show I am cleared to exit the airport.

     Outside it is foggy, but misty, cool and mild.  I walk to a taxi stand and ask the young dispatcher how to get to the church.  After a momentary mutual incomprehension due to our respective idioms, he directs me to walk along a plexiglas corridor directly to my left, which is easy enough to do.  I find the church and the church entrance easily.

     Inside a red-blonde man in his sixties or seventies is setting up the paten, the chalice and other items for use at Mass.  I confirm that there will be Mass at ten a.m., then ask if there is somewhere I might freshen up within the church building.  He has no problem with my request, and even apologizes for the modesty of the small bathroom off the sacristy.  The sink faucet runs only cold, but it is refreshing, and I am able to wash my face, brush my hair and change my underwear.  While in there I hear another man enter and address him as "Matthew".  He is the priest.

     What I thought would be an empty church catering to travellers is almost completely filled with local Catholics.  The form of the Mass is slightly different --the act of confession is said on the knees, in the pews rather than on foot, as in New York, but the liturgy here, follows the same new version which was promulgated in the beginning of the year.  Which makes sense, because it is a universal church.

     The priest is tall, young and authoritative.  He just got back from an assignment in the Philippines and preaches about Saint Francis Xavier, who died at forty-six of a fever on the beach of an island off mainland China, never having accomplished his goal of bringing Roman Catholicism there.  Yet all over Asia, Saint Francis Xavier is venerated.  The point the priest wants to make is that it was Xavier's commitment to change himself --by abandoning his sinfulness, and giving himself up to missionary work as a member of the Company of Jesus, the order of men founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola known today as the Jesuits-- that led to the renewal of the Church's mission, rather than the calls for reform of its critics.  The priest, whose name I do not catch, intones the liturgy very briskly, accompanied by two young women, a pianist and a singer.  I shake his hand at the service's end, although it does not appear to be the custom here.  The parishoners nod a greeting to the priest, who nods back, as his parishoners file by.  I see the makings of a bishop in this priest: he has an air of reverence about him, eyes quietly closed when he is in prayer, something mysterious in his personal manner of address, an absolute melding of the personality with the office.

     I return to the airport and find an empty table at the "Oak Bar Cafe" an open-plan cafe on the second floor or the airport, where I enjoy a package of smoked salmon I brought with me   I have no Euros with me, and do not want to change money yet.  The staff at the cafe kindly give me glasses of fresh water in pint beer glasses necessarily ever at the ready here.   The modern upholstery lining both sides of the cafe are the encampment of a dozen teenagers visiting Ireland as part of a school trip.  On the flight in, a good part of the plane was filled by a rugby team from New Jersey and the fathers of the team's players.  Husky, assertive men, their sons are younger versions of themselves  To a man, they all chew a lot of gum.  They are here to see a match between Ireland and France, part of the 2012 championships.    

        It is noon, and the fog has rolled in even more thickly, although the airport buildings are still visible.  Coming in for a landing earlier, I never saw the approach to the landing strip, we seemed to just drop down to the ground level and then onto the tarmac.  There seems to be no reason to think conditions will be any better by three o'clock when my flight to Rome departs.   

        Having cleared security, I am now in the Departures area, waiting for my flight gate to be announced.  This is where I get to finish my toilette: I sidle over to the duty-free cosmetics and perfume counters to slather my face with Creme de la Mer serum and Benefit moisturizer and eye cream, followed by a dousing in Narciso Rodriguez For Her.  In the boutique I also find "Faces of Ireland", a book of two hundred portraits of  recognizably Irish faces, from Pierce Brosnan and Sinead O'Connor and Gabriel  Byrne, to faces of such medieval cast their bloodlines seem to never have known any genetic heterogeneity: fair-eyed, fair-skinned, their eyes are variations on admixtures of green, their hair often auburn or ginger, their skins uniformly fine and white.  Indeed, looking around it is easy to identify the Irish from the non-Irish.  There is a way of dressing the men and women have that is more reminiscent of Britain in the 1950s than modern.    Clothing is functional, more uniform than distinct.  Women wear less make-up and jewelry than would be the case in larger cities.  Not far from the airport the "ghost estates" begin, residential developments built during the housing bubble, now empty and dangerous to young children nearby, who explore them unconscious of the risk of empty holes and water wells--one child was drowned a few weeks ago.  The "Celtic Tiger" has been stilled, replaced by once again high rates of unemployment and subsequent emigration, now not to America, but to Australia and Latin America

     I find that near the Chocolate Lounge there is an Eircom free WiFi Hub and set to checking my e-mail.  It is gratifying to find my IPad2 seems to be paying for itself.  I play with the word processing program, trying to copy text to the blog, but get stymied, both  trying to sign on to the blog, and copying the text.  Up pops "The Sorrows Of Young Werther" which I downloaded from a free reading application, but don't want to read now.  My flight is called, so I pack up and move to the departure gate.

     I am greeted by the sight of over one hundred Italian teenagers, returning from a holiday in Dublin.  I seem to be travelling on the week of a trans-Atlantic school holiday.  They are dressed in the uniform of their tribe: blue jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts, t-shirts underneath.  They all have handheld devices, although they carry playing cards obtained from an outet for Guinness --a pint of the brown stuff features on the cards' backs.  They stand in the aisles during the flight, playing cards and using their handheld devices.  The boy in the aisle seat opposite me spends part of the flight watching a sortly pornographic film featuring bikini-clad beauties.  The young women next to me pick up the duty-free magazine and discuss the cosmetic kits.  Outside, the weather is sunny as we move east, flying over the French Alps, Mont Blanc visible to the left from thirty-seven thousand feet up.

      We have one more hour of flying to go.  I set my watch to Rome time, one hour later than Dublin, in anticipation of arrival.  My friend, Manuel Otero Marti, will be at the airport to pick me up and take me to his apartment in Via Giubba, at which point I will unfold like a piece of origami, uncrushed, but indeniably a little bent.