Recently, I needed to travel to the Sunshine State & the Golden State, Florida & California respectively for work. Air travel has been something that privilege has allowed me in my adulthood, as something I’d only dream about as a child or teenager. Sure, I had friends who had traveled extensively, trips to other parts of the country or even abroad, & they seemed so exotic. Especially those who traveled to Europe for a kind of Grand Tour.
Even in high school when trips were organized by foreign language clubs, those kinds of experiences represented wealth & leisure at a level beyond my modest reach.
How strange that I still feel weird about having this privilege to travel, to live in Utah & visit new places, as if this life isn’t mine & that I’m that girl still working 2nd shift at the textile mill or hand-soldering computer boards. I mean, I saw real poverty in my hometown. Our family home sat on a hill that looked down to a valley of dilapidated tenement houses, with debris and stray animals in the yards.
My mother didn’t want me to play with the children at the “bottom of the hill.” And even though we had more than those who lived below, we still struggled financially.
Sometimes, that feels like eons ago. I never thought my life would change so dramatically. Our condo in Utah offers spectacular sweeping views of Salt Lake City lit up at night, which often reminds me of the house on the hill. My childhood bedroom had views like that at night, and I’d look over the city & watch the moving & twinkling lights. Anyway, up in the air, the world seems so big & we humans so tiny, when putting things into perspective. Those mundane worries, those supercilious concerns that dominate the routine day with stress & frustration… Well, they don’t appear to be as important anymore.
Time has a way of eroding certain aspects of yourself so that you adjust to a new normal, become a different version of you. I think of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Who will I be when I touch the back down on the ground again?
My family had similar views of air travel. It was the trip of a lifetime, her high school graduation present, for my sister to fly to Britain, all those decades ago.
I never flew anywhere, except on business trips, until one fall when, after postponing a summer vacation for the third year in a row, my spirits rebelled, and I decided to take a winter vacation someplace warm. It ended up being New Zealand. And a flight that took almost 24 hours was my initiation into traveling on my own for my own purposes by airplane.
P.S. It was a good vacation. And warm, too, as it was February.