sǝuoſ ǝuıɥsunS | notebook, journal, inter-web log

I spent Christmas eve building bunk beds, cleaning my apartment, and getting ready for a visit with my son. Calvin stopped by and we thought we’d have a coffee at mine, but when I discovered I was out of milk we went out. I love walking and talking with Calvin. He’s one of the most wonderful people I know. Against his internal patterns, he will walk with me to the store, and discuss the relevance of cultural politics in line, and all the way home. Rare and dear is a friend who spends that kind of time with me. Then, just when I realized I’d built the basics of the bunk beds wrong, Megan came over and we dashed off to Wallgreens to return a space heater I’d bought the morning before for a pirate christmas gift exchange. I drew number 11, and went last. So rather than open the last package on the table, I stole the gift I’d brought to the party for myself… That may seem just awful, but the payback is that when I got home and plugged it in the heater blew the circuit, and when I got back upstairs after flipping the breaker it never worked again. The lovely people staffing the registers at Wallgreens and I talked about how no one liked that heater anyway. I exchanged it for a larger ceramic radiator which is nice and toasty warm. Just as I got the last of the bunk bed together Jill arrived to have a cup of coffee and pass up the pillows and grin at me as I struggled with the bottom sheet, and packed up the last of my single carry on bag for the evening’s journey. Jill drove me to the airport, bless her heart. I swear I have the best friends in the world. I am blessed, and grateful. Endlessly full of love and compassion in return.

The airport was deserted. I felt a kinship with everyone boarding their respective red eye flights to destinations unknown. My flight was packed, and the sleepy blonde woman who sat beside me licked at her pen and furiously attempted the crossword, all the sudoku puzzles in the magazine, and then we talked about Delaware (I thought of Arline, and how she’s not really from there either,) the surprising rent in San Francisco, the weather in the Mission, and then we smiled into one another’s sleepy faces and agreed that it is good to follow football. Not because we like it at all, but because so many people love it, and it fills the spaces in conversations like few other things. Eventually we flicked off our overhead lights, leaned back in our chairs and tried to sleep in the last row of the airplane. The flight was extremely turbulent, so we would wake when the plane dropped and clutch one another, then turn our eyes away from each other, slowly let go, and try to go back to sleep. Eventually we landed in the pre dawn of Christmas day, and parted, drifting off in our separate directions.

I watched the sun rise from the front entrance of the Marriot hotel at Philadelphia International. Stagg was up in NE PA for the day, naturally with family, so my hopes of taking the train into town for breakfast and a nice wander with Michael were dashed, but the strange and weary travelers made for beautiful ambient cinema once I decided that $180 for four hours sleep at the hotel was extortion. The Russian woman with a deep dark tan smiled at me when I declined her offer, and sat down at the upright piano and began to play galloping christmas songs. She sang in Russian, and the four previously scattered children in the lobby came running to see who was galloping their long beige fingernails over the lacquered tops of the keys. I went back outside to have a cigarette in the smoking hut, and when I returned Natalie Cole was playing in the speakers, and there was no one around.

I slept a few minutes in the chair upstairs (where the plug for my computer is, and the internet access seems strongest,) in the same chair the man was reclined, mouth wide open, snoring when I first arrived. “Now I’m that weird man.” I thought to myself, and I grinned at the little boy making the peace sign at me. “Happy christmas!” I said to him, and his mother dragged him away from me and down the stairs explaining to him that it wasn’t safe to just walk up to strange men they didn’t know like that. Yes. I had indeed become the weird man sleeping in the chair. Lovely.

In a few hours my son will arrive. We will quickly hug and kiss, laugh and tickle, hold hands and clear security and board a flight for San Francisco together.

Merry Christmas!

love,
Sunshine