The longest day

4:25 pm 20 June 2007

I am drinking my last really good cup of tea. Or maybe I’ll have one tomorrow morning before we land in San Francisco. The tea on these Air New Zealand flights is lovely. The trip has begun. We have taken the train to the cab to the first plane. It seems quite a quiet beginning to such a long time away. I am excited and melancholy, happy and sad. I guess life is like that a lot.

Naomi has discovered, sometime in the last week or so, the futility of life. She has had another layer of development, has uncovered another piece of life to be sad about: that we’re all going to die some time. This thought has nearly paralysed her as it has nearly every human on the planet at one time or another. She is afraid to ride on this airplane, afraid to go to sleep at night, afraid to have a babysitter rather than have me home with her. We take deep breaths together and talk about how it’s possible to carry on with life anyway.

This sometimes leaves me asking: how is it possible to carry on with life, anyway? Here we have constructed a life that is about tearing ourselves out of the US context and planting ourselves in new soil around the world. This means that we’ll always feel a pang of jealousy when the next door neighbours have a big family bash, and we’ll spend more time than most folks travelling on airplanes across the Pacific.

1:50 pm 21 June NZ time/ 8:50 pm 20 June DC time

Now we’re towards the last leg of the trip. We’ve had the culture shock of the big San Francisco airport, the astonishing long lines that are everywhere in the US. It suddenly seems strange to be on an airplane for so many hours without filling out an immigration form. Now Michael is continuing an on-going conversation with the head flight attendant about the violence level in the movie that is being shown on every screen on the plane. Aidan is freaked by the movie, and desperately trying to keep his head down. The flight attendants are sorry, but feel helpless about this as the movie is being watched by quite a few people on the plane.

There is a brilliant sunset which I, in my aisle seat, can only see in the warmth of the light on the seats on the other side of the plane. I have to breathe through the frustration of an aisle seat (especially when the person at the window here has closed the shade) because I love watching the US go by on these west-east flights. And besides, it's not like I haven't seen any good sunsets lately.

One flight attendant, her thick make-up glossy at the beginning of the flight, now looks polished to a high-sheen. She is carrying a baby up and down the aisle, something you see on Air New Zealand flights but I’ve never seen on a US flight before. The baby, she tells us all, is a Korean girl, travelling with her chaperone (who is now asleep) and going to meet her new parents who will pick her up at the Philadelphia airport. I have these funky mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. On the one hand, the flight attendant is admiring and kind and loving about this baby, and it’s beautiful to be present right at the beginning of a new and lovely thing—we’ll see the new parents, and I can imagine the joy they feel right now, knowing their new baby is in the air on her way to become part of their family. And there is a sad arrogance about it which is characteristic of the US. People in the aisles around me talk about “that lucky girl” to come to a new life in America. And indeed, that could be true. But there’s something in the salvation of it all that bothers me just a little, and that little bothering turns bigger as the flight attendant gets more into the story, says that the parents have already adopted this little girl’s sister, and that the children share a mother but not a father, leading the flight attendant to think the mother is quite likely a prostitute. I don’t know about you, but probably half of the families I know have children who are half-siblings, and I don’t know a single prostitute. What is it about the assumptions we make about a Korean mother who puts two children up for adoption? How do those assumptions influence our thinking about our place in the world as Americans? Benevolent arrogance can be unintentionally harmful.

Other than probing the depths of the assumptions I see woven inside the culture (and watching my assumptions about their assumptions), we have had a trip that’s quite painless considering we’re now past the 24 hour mark and still with several hours to go. It’s hard to imagine that 25 hours ago, almost exactly, we picked the kids up and got on the train to take us to the first plane. It’s hard to imagine the depths of the changes that take place thousands of miles underneath us—topographically, politically, meteorologically. We have moved from winter to summer. We have left behind what today is the shortest day of the year in New Zealand, to celebrate what will be the longest day of the year in the US. We have had our lives brush up against thousands of strangers, and brush closely against those who have sat in the windows on these trips—Kath an 20 year immigrant to New Zealand on her way to visit family in Portland who was violently ill during the very bumpy first hours of the trip across the Pacific; the woman next to us on a business trip to Philly who grew up in Northern Virginia; the woman next to Aidan who also moved far from her family which bewilders them. On an airplane, you are thrown into fast and deep proximity with a stranger, sometimes for many hours, and then you separate forever. How do those people become part of the stories we tell ourselves into the future?

How will this trip weave itself into our assumptions about ourselves, our American-ness, our New Zealand-ness, our family-ness? These questions are all before us, and only the vista from 30,000 feet on the way across the world in the other direction will offer any clarity.