Staying-Home Note:
Heyday
18 October 2018

¶ I don’t know how she does it. Kathleen got up at 4:15 on Monday morning to catch an early flight to Dallas. This morning, she did the same thing to come home.

She was glad that I wasn’t with her, she said, because both flights were bumpy. The flight out was conventionally turbulent, but the flight back — “It was more like going downstairs.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t ask.

It used to be that turbulence was the only discomfort of travel. Now every step of the way is fraught, beginning with worries about the intestinal fortitude (not a metaphor) that’s required to drive all the way to JFK.

I’m not given to romanticizing the past, but I should have been much, much happier in the heyday of railroads.

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