San Diego, September 29
By Milt Abel | October 2, 2011
San Diego, September 29
People who travel regularly have packing down to a science. For me it’s more of a superstitious rite, with some mumbo-jumbo thrown in, right next to my toiletries bag. There’s a lot of fear involved, some mindless repetition (because that’s the way it’s been done for years) -and depending how distracted I am during the process, some important omissions. Maybe chanting and incense balls would help me focus.
This trip, a two and a half-week cruise on my favorite line, Holland America, I forgot white socks. I had one pair with me, I wore tennis shoes for the short flight from PDX to Vancouver, Canada and I knew I’d got through security only once. I could untie and lace a couple tennis shoes once in a day. When you go through several airports in single day you can find yourself taking on and off your shoes more often than an Iraqi heckler at a George Bush speech. Those days I wear loafers. (did they plan on the pun on the naming of that style shoe?)
The style these days for kids and their ‘kicks’ (slang term for shoes) is to not lace up their tennis shoes. I believe it is a natural continuation of the style of the extremely loose and low-riding jeans. You know that style I’m talking about; where the waistband is below the crescent of the buttocks, and patterned boxers cover the distance to the waist. The suspense of watching someone walking about like that: I keep thinking the slightest additional weight in a pocket and the pants drop completely to the ankles, thereby ‘pants’ing themselves. Efficient, that. No pranksters necessary. Absolutely everybody is downsizing these days.
I had heard somewhere that the oversized pants came from prison. Particularly Los Angeles County jail, where inmates were giving prison garb for short periods, but because of the overwhelming numbers and high turnover, pants rarely fit. The miss-sizing drifted into the street, and became cool. I don’t recall which comic I heard say it first, but the baggy pants also implied the wearer was incapable of running, -which brought on another layer of bravado, ‘nothing is going to get me to run, I’m too cool.’ The untied shoelaces? Well, that implies a certain cool too. ‘If I trip and fall on my face, I’m too cool to need to get up.’ ‘Maybe I’ll just take me a nap right here.’
With only one pair of white socks I had an excuse to not go to the gym; you can’t work out in black socks and white tennis shoes. It’d be counterproductive. The purpose of going to the gym is to keep young looking, show up in running shorts, white sneakers, and dark socks and you look ten years older the instant you cross the threshold. I suppose I should be thankful I forgot my sock suspenders; wear those to the gym and anthropologists would be crouching behind the elliptical machines trying to observe me and my undisturbed behavior.
So I needed supplies. Our first scheduled stop, Astoria, Oregon was crossed out from the itinerary when a hurricane-force winds wouldn’t allow us to go anywhere near a port. I had to wait until the ship worked its way completely down the California coast to its last stop before heading to Hawaii: San Diego.
San Diego is one of my favorite ports because it has some of the consistently nicest weather in the world. Like San Francisco, it is heavily influenced by lots of the Pacific Ocean surrounding, or burrowing itself, into the city. It works like a governor, not allowing the temperature to swing too hot or too cold; most of the year it is Goldilocks nice.
There’s a mall about ten blocks by foot from the cruise pier and I was able to pick up proper socks for the gym. The mall, Horton Plaza, is pretty nice as malls go, but it has the most convoluted layout of any mall I’ve every visited. Imagine if M.C. Escher had had been blindfolded and spun around a dozen times, then uncovered and told to immediately design a shopping mall for downtown San Diego. That would be Horton Plaza. The parking garage is even worse. People have become lost in there, only to emerge years later in the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs, dazed, not remember a thing about the missing years, or why they were wearing suspenders for their socks.
Topics: comedy, cruise ship, humor, travel | please add Comments »
Open Spaces
By Milt Abel | September 26, 2011
Open Spaces
To board my short flight from Portland to Vancouver, Canada I had to cross a bit of tarmac. My plane, a smaller prop-engine commuter was parked away from the terminal and accessed only through a rolling staircase that could have just as easily been parked inside a Home Depot; maybe it was at one time, it may have brought down dozens of toilet seat lids -I know I have, but not as often as I’ve lifted them.
There were no signposts indicating this was the plane that would take us to Vancouver. Some commuter terminals have such regular routes that signs, removable like slide-in buffet labels, are placed at the spaced openings from the covered walkway: it says ‘Fresno’ and you know to turn onto the tarmac and follow the cross-stripped walkway to the plane. I wonder if foreigners visiting Texas, struggling with English and the ever-increasing incorporation of Spanish, might be confused in a commuter terminal like this when a sign states, with a pointing arrow, ‘Plano’. Do they they think to themselves, “Yes, of course, but where’s it going?”
Yesterday, Sunday, my plane wasn’t clearly marked. It was the only aircraft on the tarmac that had any activity about it; ground crew, and a luggage handler, but I was in the middle of a big break between passengers and there was no one to immediately follow. It had to be the right one, but I was going to make sure. As I stepped into the fuselage I asked the flight attendant, “Vancouver, Canada?”
After he immediately confirmed I was on the right plane I took a moment, and explained my anxiety. “Usually we have a gangway that pours us right into the plane like a funnel. But here, it’s so open. We could have wandered.” I didn’t think of the analogy until later, but I would have added, had I thought of it then, “Like a pachinko ball, I just randomly bounced into this opening. It was all chance.”
The attendant was courteous enough to smile again before turning his attention to the next boarding passenger, but the anxiety of the open space registered with me. I usually don’t look for the source of my missing comfort; in this case it was the chute of a gangway, leading me without question to where I needed to go. In the past I just trusted things, or trusted myself to recover or adjust. Didn’t give it a second thought. But you get older.
Open a door to an empty gymnasium for a dozen six-year olds and they’ll scream in delight and begin devouring the open space in a run. Present the same situation to sixty-year olds and they’ll despair over the distance needing to be covered before they can exit. And hopefully it’s clearly marked.
I’m currently in a vast open space, or my ship is. I’m aboard the Holland America Westerdam and we are out in the Pacific, a few hours away from anchoring at Astoria, Oregon. A town that is about a hundred miles directly west from my home town. After Astoria, we head south for two sea days then dock in San Diego, then head across the Pacific to Hawaii.
That’s going to be an open space; the Pacific. I spoke to my mother the day before I left ( I try and be a good son and call each of my parents each weekend) and she let out a slight gasp when I said I was sailing across the Pacific.
“Oh, Milt. That satellite is falling in the Pacific.”
A weather satellite has lost its orbit and has been announced for weeks that it will fall from the sky somewhere in the Pacific -likely in the areas near the Pacific Northwest. Odds of being struck by a piece have been figured to be one-in-two-trillion. Just like my mother to find something extraordinary to worry about. But she’s older than me, and has had more time, more vastness, in which to find her losses of comfort.
Topics: comedy | please add Comments »
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