Early Travel

December, 1959, and wasn't it something to see snow on the ground, everything white, fluffy and cold? Monroe County Airport, Rochester, New York, and as we pulled away in my aunt's Chevrolet, something about her son, Gregg, captivated me.  He was wearing a coat with a furry hood, sitting in the back seat next to me, and looking utterly unlike anyone I knew.  There was nothing particularly visually distinctive about him.  It was more his body language and general demeanor.  He seemed to curl into himself, cozily and contentedly.  He smiled at me in a manner that conveyed warmth and deep security.  His mother, Marion, drove and chatted to my father beside her in the front seat.  I was happy, even relieved, to be in Rochester.  I had never met my aunt or my uncle, at least not in living memory.  But I could already feel something settled about them and their family.  There was a contentedness and a quality that, many years and several thousand psychoanalytic dollars later, I would come to understand as security.  I smiled at Gregg.  Gregg smiled at me.  We did not have much to say to each other.  I was twelve and he was six.  But we were having a pleasant exchange.  With his overcoat and coziness, he seemed as bundled up as a chocolate in a box of sweets.

I knew that my family was disintegrating.  My mother had flown to Dallas with my brother and sister.  My father and I were here.  It was 3 p.m. in Rochester, and the Mohawk Airlines DC-3 that had delivered us marked the end of a grueling journey.  One of the big airlines was on strike.  We had flown from Los Angeles to Chicago all night.  Dazed, I waited at Midway Airport while my father purchased tickets that got us as far as Detroit.  From there we flew to Buffalo.  And now here.  It was over, and I had never been so tired.  More than the trip, with my mother's departure with my siblings and my father hard at work on a divorce, I hadn't slept well for weeks.

My aunt and uncle had the oddest of things, a house with not even two stories, but three.  My aunt showed me all the floors.  The bedrooms were upstairs.  Mine doubled as a storage room, with piles of my grandmother's furniture stacked against the edges.  There were other bedrooms, and a very steep flight of steps lead to an attic room.  A college student lived there, someone from the University of Rochester, probably, or perhaps a seminary.  The details have blurred, of course, but the college student was named Doreen, and she helped care for my cousins.  All this care.  It was very strange.

Even though I was impossibly tired, the excitement of travel and the three-hour displacement in North American time, kept me up.  My father was talking to my aunt and uncle, all sorts of things I didn't understand, but being an apprentice adult, thought I should have a go at mastering.  My grandfather, my mother's father, someone I never met...such were the family rifts...had had shock therapy.  What was shock therapy, I asked?  In fact, I had been sitting on the floor, the carpet being very soft, and taking in the sense of cushiness and warmth and permanence.  With the adult conversation going on above my head, both literally and figuratively, the players being seated in sofas and armchairs, I decided to take notes.  Shock therapy.  I could spell that.  But what was it?  When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked my father.  Never mind, he said, looking mildly embarrassed.  My uncle looked faintly concerned.  

I understood in some subliminal way that this wasn't for kids, and the knowledge reassured me.  This wasn't my father's house.  This was my aunt and uncle's.  Here, kids were kids.  And furthermore, my uncle said in his unassuming way, it was late.  The concept of time and time zones had captivated me all day as we had moved east.  It was not really 6:30 a.m. in Chicago, but 4:30 a.m. in California.  Unless you happened to not be in California, which we weren't.  My 12-year-old head sank to my knees, sitting exhausted and depleted in the crowded, on-strike Chicago airport.  And now, white snow reflecting the streetlight off the front lawn while I sat on a carpet and was told, in effect, I was still a kid, my uncle was talking about bed.

Everything okay?  My aunt either tucked me in or conveyed that quality of being cozily prepared for the night.  Despite the bitter cold outside, heat from unseen radiators came at me from all directions.  When the lights were out, the jumbled pile of furniture seemed friendly, massed to keep me company for the night.  The bed had a mahogany frame and was very high.  I couldn't sit down on it, more climbed aboard.  The bed had a satin comforter, shiny and smooth, an odd unknown thing to a desert kid.  With all the warmth from the glowing furniture, the smooth satin, kids being kids and going to bed, I fell dead asleep.  I slept for a full 12 hours, perhaps a lifetime record, except for the occasional medical emergency.  When I awoke the next day, my aunt was making eggs.  It was late for breakfast, she explained, but never mind.

Comfort, peace, contentment, these are not things I take for granted in my life.  At times, they are not things I take at all.  Perhaps I feel undeserving.  Often, these qualities are simply foreign and unfamiliar.  I really wonder if jetlag hits me particularly hard or if I am particularly bad at rolling with the circadian punch.  Certainly, there are times when one has to let go.  When nothing is to be done.  When doing nothing is doing everything.