Flight of the Milkshake

I woke up Tuesday morning at 9 am happy, to be in my own bed, but with a three hour minus dollop of jet lag. So it felt like 6 am.

All we did, my wife and I, was take a four day trip to the west coast for the wedding of my nephew Danny and his fiancee Joanna.  I’m not complaining or implying that the trip was difficult or caused problems that now need to be adjudicated, merely that it was onerous, though I’m speaking for myself only. My wife enjoyed herself thoroughly, from setting our itinerary and packing our toilet kit with eight pre-cut pieces of floss to save on space in our carry-on, to reminding me that the four days would pass in a snap.  She’s one of those happy, forward-looking individuals who upon turning the deadbolt to our front door and sealing in all the banality and routine accumulated there over the months preceding our current trip, walks to our car where I wait blankly wondering if we’ll ever make it back home after the eons this trip lasts,  attaches her seatbelt, and views everything to follow as if it were a pilgrimage  to the fountain of youth or to the day before she experienced boredom for the first time in her life. 

I back the car down the driveway, watching our little yellow happy home recede slowly and sadly, and trusting, though not caring, if there is traffic in the street.  My partner of many years is flossing from a plastic dispenser she keeps in the glove compartment while chattering and plinking her floss in my direction, not on purpose of course, but simply because she likes to talk and floss simultaneously, while inhaling  fresh air from her half-opened passenger window and exhorting me to look at this cloud formation and that cloud formation until I muster just enough of an agreeable response to throw her off the scent of mourning our home’s abandonment.

We flew for a long time and landed with popped ears at the smallest international airport I’ve ever encountered.  There’s a lot of money floating around Palm Springs California and I’m guessing that’s why it has an international airport designation even though it has only two runways and one windsock. Six people can fund a flight on a 747 if they're the right people, or they’ve done well in nearby Vegas, so money’s the ticket I guess. 

The wedding and reception took place on the ninth hole of a posh golf course where it was a hundred degrees in full sun at 4pm. It was so hot the battery powered handheld fans that were passed out were blinking orange and hot to the touch, their batteries probably overheating, and the cup on the green had popped halfway out of its hole.  Palm trees a hundred feet tall and a thousand yards off waved back and forth like worshipers in a mosque. My wife was looking peaked, and our niece  held a parasol above her while I flapped at the heat with a paper fan. I also held one of those  small fans in my free hand near my wife’s face and my dark suit-jacketed arm sagged in the heat. The bride wore white, the groom and his men were luminescent in blue suits cut in the european fashion, and a crow, hovering directly above them on a thermal,  cawed three times, “caw, caw caw,” at the beginning of the service. Thankfully, it flew off without crapping on anyone and nobody spoke of the curse of the crow later at the reception. Women were crying as the bride made her way up the green; but their tears wicked off in the heat and though they didn’t need to  dab their eyes, they did so anyway to assure others they were conveying the usual sentiments. 

The reverend in charge of the whole production made the  five thousand mile trip worth it. He was overheating like everyone else, but he was putting a lot of energy into his work too, and it looked like he should be pouring sweat but the perspiration flashed off his red and shiny face so quickly that  you could practically hear it, like water spitting on a grill.  I wondered how long he could last up there. He had a voice that  sounded like he was breathing from a helium tank, and so I perked up thinking he was going to be a disaster, but,  amazingly, he delivered the finest, funniest wedding sermon I’ve ever heard. It was witty  and serious and well-written. It built steadily to a rousing finale of ‘love conquering all’, and to its great, great credit, was free of much of the Lord-osis that other evangelical services I’ve attended focused their attention on, and for this I gave thanks. I asked the reverand about the speech after the service was over,  and he told me he had written it the previous day after interviewing Danny and Joanna. I pictured him back in his writing lair trying to lift up the lord's work to the level of art…and he did it - yes, he was an artist, a writer in fact,  and this was his short story masterpiece. He performed it the next day in the heat for all of us, standing there like a young Danial Webster, one fist shaking and clenching the page he was reading as he rebuked young Danny for waiting so long to ask for Joanna’s hand, while clutching his unread pages with the other,  casting aside the ones he read as if he was giving them back to history and the desert wind.

After the service, I shook his hand warmly, but there was none of the usual claminess due to the heat,  and said, “Bravo!” wishing I could have gulped a breath of helium first.

Now I’m back home in Caledonia New York to what I thought would be a great relief, but instead I’m in a fog of dejection and emotionally enhanced muffled misery. It’s a negative state of mind; an entitled state of crankiness even. Isn’t this how an old dude like me should present? As a collection of stereotypes that AARP tries to appease with articles like, “They upped my meds and I’m loving it!”? I should be happy and content, now that I’m back on my old well trod path, down puttering in my workshop sorting washers and bolts and gluing the sole back on my aging Walmart slip ons.  

The truth is I’m a seventy one year old man who would love to be fifty again  for no other reason than that was a long time ago.  A few months back, I stepped onto a full Amtrak train and a young woman got up and offered me her seat. That was a first and I wondered if I should start taking advantage of my years from now on and play the part of the dignified senior  the young  should revere and respect and nod their heads and wink because that’s how I was taught; to offer my seat to the elderly on a bus and reap the approving nods acknowledging my good breeding. But if I did play that part, wouldn't I forgo all rights to the sense of self that wants to believe I’m  still attractive to beautiful women? Whether I ever was, that’s another matter.  

And another thing; six obscenely rich people paying to fly a 747 is one thing - they probably won big in Vegas.  A goddamn $12.50 milkshake is another, dammit all! Such was the abuse my wife and I suffered at a Palm Springs ice cream shoppe the day after the wedding. It was my idea, not my wife’s, but even so, shouldn’t she share some of the blame since she let me do it? If you can make an International Airport profitable with only a hundred or so Hollywood stars as your customer base then you can do anything to normal people who mistakenly wander in from afar. I stumbled out of the shoppe and wondered, why not twenty dollars, thirty, fifty? I would have paid it happily, no, laughingly, no hysterically! I wondered how many people had gone berserk after leaving the shoppe with or without their cold rape of a treat. None hopefully, for I am a Catholic, though lapsed . 

We walked for a while until we found a bench to sit on and looked at the mountains dimming in the distance  hoping our milkshakes wouldn’t warm up too much.  I sucked on my straw and my wife tasted her shake with a spoon. We looked at each other. Mine was a damn good shake! Hers too!   What the hell? I began to feel that feeling of feeling like I was one of the masters of the universe on that 747. Like Palm Springs was made for us and a few other world beaters. And all it took was $12.50 and a view of a jumbo jet rising to international heights in the wavy, shimmering distance.

The flight back to soft and downy Caledonia was one hundred percent packed full. We were told this explicitly, “packed full”,  by the airline official at the gate as if it were our duty to be good little sardines.  I thought back on the last few days, about the wedding and the plethora of incidents, events, occurrences and situations that had taken place. Besides the regrettable but unforgettable ice cream incident, there were details of the hotel and pool that were worth noting. I took out my notebook and penned the following thoughts which I tried to jam into one sentence for brevity: “I woke up each morning in Palm Springs and made a cup of coffee in the room which I took out to the hotel’s swimming pool, an almond shaped affair with a wide concrete apron whiting out to an endless concrete pad and forming a giant heat sink around the fragile morsel of the blue-bottomed swimming pool, wherein already napping patrons, drifting and becalmed in satin waters,  greeted the new day with Mai Tais  and dreams of sex or winning big in nearby Vegas, or, alternately,  fought nightmares where they took on the shape of  man-Gods, shipwrecked and flung into the sea, waiting to die, dashed and ruined  upon the rocks of the storm-swept Hebrides.”  I put away my notebook at this point knowing that inspiration of this literary sort is fleeting.

There were narrow gauge copper pipes running horizontally around the perimeter of the pool enclosure, spraying a fine mist of water vapor morning noon and night. This was repeated in other venues around Palm Springs, notably at restaurants with outdoor seating. I imagine it felt good to sit under these misters and cool off while your salad, also continually misted,  slumped and turned flaccid and your crispy fries wilted;  the catsup running off  them like tomato soup, but we weren’t anxious to sit and pay $175.00 for a light lunch. I did for a minute though, I really did, because a twisted, secret part of myself wanted the kick of throwing wild money at something I really didn’t give a damn about. 

There was a casino opposite our hotel though, and it was this that caught my eye upon waking from a desultory dream, not in the hotel pool, but on a chaise that I had fallen asleep on almost two hours before, sunburned and dehydrated and craving a pitcher of Metropolitans… “Forget about going in there,”  my wife explained pointing at the casino, “We have a plane to catch, and the soles of your feet look like bacon.” She took a picture of them and turned the phone towards me. They looked like roasted beets. The pain hadn’t set in yet and we made it to the airport and onto the flight. I was OK until we reached Denver where I removed my shoes and socks. My wife commandeered one of those golf carts with a driver that beeps and whizzes its way around the airport. Though I wanted to wave at people, I just hung my head. My wife walked alongside the car like she was a sky marshall. We made our connection and I made my way down the jetway gingerly. My feet were on fire but my toes were like ice. The second leg of the trip was four hours and I was praying for a water landing for my soles on fire while fashioning a couple of loose fitting airsick bags to warm up my toes. It didn’t work and I spent the last two hours of the flight in misery; though the snacks weren’t bad.

What did I learn from this departure from my normal life? Did I expand my horizons? Did I grow as a human being; a fellow traveler? Did I acquire a benevolent wisdom to be passed down to generations yet to come.? I don’t think I'm the person to ask. So I asked my wife. I asked her an hour ago, and she still hasn’t stopped laughing. 

The End