Sleeping It Off
It’s the morning of July 4th and I am bone tired. I actually have a decent reason for that. My daughter and her family of four flew in last night. It was late last night because while we reserved the flight more than four months ago, this is a big travel year as we read about more and more every day. Making up for COVID may be a part of it, but I sense there is more of a Last Hurrah aspect to it. I fear that our consumer-driven economy has taken us to a place where we are so beyond a chicken in every pot that we have a global sense of entitlement that feels very unbecoming. In some ways, leisure travel is the ultimate luxury of the recently affluent. They have heard about places and seen pictures and perhaps watched cable news travel shows, so they damn well want to go there and see it for themselves. It all feels a bit like a drunken sailor on shore leave for the third week in a row. At some point our excesses devolve into a sense of apathy that falls over us like a shroud. To some it feels like a great awakening is about to happen and that our grogginess will make us feel like we need to sleep off the last ten years.
But of course, in my most egalitarian way of thinking, MY family travel, whether last week to Virginia Beach or this week with my daughter and her family heading out here for a coming month of California fun, is justifiable family travel and therefore exempt from any mass connotations. But the only flight I could find for them arrived here from JFK scheduled for 12:47am last night. Naturally, on one of the busiest travel days of the year, the flight was delayed by an hour. It was not the usual late arriving aircraft (this one had flown up from Jamaica through the early-season Hurricane Beryl with no ill effects), and it was not local or landing zone weather (it is clear and warm in both places), but this time it has to do with the strange notion of improper weight distribution. It seems they had to go back to the gate from the runway (they were on track to get in almost an hour early) and were told that the ground crew needed to place some sandbags as tactical ballast in the plane’s hold. What is this, 1924?
The new arrival time was suddenly 1:24am and that presented the interesting question of how best to gather them from the airport and still be wide awake enough to man the grill today for our Independence Day party. I refuse to let my granddaughters take an Uber, so it was just a matter of whether to try to get some sleep before going for them or just barreling through and getting my sleep on the back end. I tried the former and managed to get an hour of shut-eye, but then I chose to just get on with it and drove down to the airport, stopping along the way to do any and every errand I could do (like going to the bank). Even with that, I arrived into the familiar cell phone lot of the San Diego Airport called Lindbergh Field in honor of the nearby building of The Spirit of Saint Louis airplane of Charles Lindbergh back in 1928. The airport is the most active single-runway airport in America and is also known as the most urban airport in service. The landing pattern for incoming planes flies very close to the San Diego skyline off to the south of the flight line. Efforts to relocate the city’s airport to a spot further north was thwarted sixty years ago due to the activity at the Naval Air Station at Miramar (a.k.a. The original Top Gun). Meanwhile, the city has doubled down and built out its terminal structures to be some of the nicest and most convenient big city airport in existence. The cell phone waiting lot is at the north end of the complex and it’s Porta-potties are well known to me. I sat there watching several episodes of The Bear when suddenly a service truck pulled up to me and shined a flashlight in my truck cab. I felt like a high school kid caught doing something I shouldn’t as the officer told me that the lot was closing. I had no idea that they closed the cell phone lot, but apparently it is set to close as the last flight of the night arrives. I looked at my phone and saw that, indeed, the delayed Delta flight from JFK was the last plane of the night.
Normally, the arrivals pick-up area at SAN is tightly controlled by roaming traffic cops (like most urban airports). “Move along” and the waving arm are the weapons of those cops, but tonight they were nowhere in evidence. It was late and there were not so many cars queuing to pick up passengers, so I luxuriated in just sitting at the curb waiting for my charges to deplane. In no time at all, they were out at the curb and in even more incredible fashion, son-in-law John was out with the luggage as well. Going to the airport in the middle of the night is quite convenient if not for the tiring hour. With my precious cargo and the always leading-edge conversation with John (this time on the state of the Crypto Market and the problems of regulating Social Media), I whisked us up the 15 to Hidden Meadows and my hilltop. It was 2:20am and not a creature was stirring in the hood (at least not that I could see). I let the kids jump into their turned-down beds and I crashed hard for what amounted to four hours more of sleep before my regular wake-up time rolled around and opened my eyes.
Sleeping it off was harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it is the excitement of my family’s arrival, maybe the anticipation of Buddy welcoming new strangers to the house, maybe it is thinking about all that needs doing for the party this afternoon, and then maybe it is that this is the most symbolically worrisome Independence Day we have had for several centuries. All of the former reasons are well in hand now, but the last one remains as an ongoing threat to our stability as a nation. It will not sleep off for some time. We have a lot of political hangover to contend with and there is no hair of the dog that bit us to help make it go away.
The Fourth of July has been a special day for me ever since I was an expat living in Costa Rica in 1959. Expats went to the U.S. Embassy in San Jose for an All-American picnic with lots of hot dogs and fireworks. It was a special day and I can still remember the feelings of patriotism as only a kid who loved being an American can feel. I revisited that tradition in high school in Rome, except the country was more sophisticated and the American expat community was much larger. There is something special about this day to me and I must say that I wish that all that is happening in our country were just a bad dream. However, I feel like it’s not and that just pretending I can sleep it off is perhaps nothing but wishful thinking.