The Message of Flight

The Message of Flight

          On Friday we will fly out to San Diego for a five-day escape to our home out there.  Ever since we bought the house seven years ago, whenever I fly out, I feel like I am, indeed, escaping reality.  When we land at the gorgeous and efficient San Diego International Airport, formerly Lindbergh Field, we are picked up by our brother and sister-in-law in our Tesla X and we go to C-Level Restaurant on San Diego Bay for a general catch-up lunch.  We then drive the thirty-five minutes to our home in Hidden Meadows, on the top of a high hill that looks west to the Pacific Ocean and, on a clear day, Catalina Island, and to the east to Mount Palomar and the San Jacinto Mountains and, again on a clear day, the San Gabriel Mountains.  Along the way, I go on my iPhone and make sure my hot tub is heating up and I regale in the beauty of the southern California countryside along Rt.15.  It helps the time fly by that I am driving my amazing Tesla with its whisper-quiet electric engine and its powerful acceleration.  I may even test out the latest software update that allows the autonomous driving protocol to do all the work on the ride, keeping us safe in San Diego midday traffic.

          If I sound like William Wordsworth with my “heart leaping up”, it would not be far from the truth.  This is exactly how I feel when I land in San Diego.  For some reason (probably a combination of all of what I have said above) it makes me very happy to go out to San Diego.  I have lived my whole adult life in the New York Metro area (save two years in Toronto).  Whatever I would call my life is here in New York.  My kids and grandkids live here.  Most of my friends live here.  My work has always been here.  My heritage is in upstate New York.  And yet, for some reason, I cannot get past this feeling of great joy when I go to San Diego.  As I ready myself to move there full-time at the end of the year (a scant five months from now), this feeling gives me reason to wonder.  The fundamental question I cannot yet answer is whether I feel this way because San Diego is a wonderful place to exist or whether it serves as my own personal escape.  Obviously, the question I am asking is whether I will feel that joy of presence when I am living there full-time.  Will I feel the same joy in 2020 when I land at JFK?  Will New York be my new escape?

          I plan to return regularly to New York for all the reason I declare it as where my life happens to live.  First, let’s be accurate.  My life is mostly about Kim and she and I will be together whichever place we choose to be.  So let’s start at the most important place, my kids and grandkids.  It is not easy to sort this issue out since it is bound up with lots of baggage on all sides, as parent/child relations always are.  My eldest son told me this week he would rather I was moving to Florida, but that he was otherwise OK with the move.  That means he would rather I be a three-hour flight versus a five-hour flight away.  Remember, we are hardly the first couple to move to the sun away from their kids. I hadn’t seen my son in the flesh in a month.  My daughter and her brood we see more often and she is more emotional about the issue, but she sees great value in having a jumping-off point for visits to Disneyland, which she visits regularly.  As for my youngest son, he comes for dinner weekly, but around the time we move he will be getting his serious other back from the wilds of Minnesota, where she has been working for two years.  I suspect the weekly dinners would be far less frequent with that change of life as it evolves.

          I am not yet clear how often we will fly back from San Diego since a lot of it will depend on my work schedule.  If I continue to work, I will need to be back more often, if not, it will be whenever we feel like it.  In any case, for 2020 and 2021, I will officially predict a combined visitation of 15 trips with something like a split of ten in 2020 and five in 2021.  Some of that will depend on whether Kim was serious when she recently said we should consider spending more of the summer in Ithaca.  A summer in Ithaca would make visits to the City much easier.  The Cornell bus, strangely enough, is still a five-hour ride, and the Cornell Club is quite accommodative if we want to stay in midtown.  There’s a lot to figure out about this program, but I can assure you it is all workable for people like Kim and me since we are, by nature, planners and can make arrangements well in advance.

          This morning on the news I heard the expression “the message of flight”.  I immediately thought I had missed some new meme that was floating around in pop culture. Google tells me that I must be thinking about sad texts from a missing Malaysian airliner, so they were no help.  I was left to my own devices to sort this out and I believe the context of the quote was in regard to African-Americans dreaming of a better life than what exists for them in the United States.  The message of flight was that we can try to dream ourselves out of our less than perfect existence, but that will not help fix the problems that put upon us.  This is a quite heavy message and not being either an African-American or a person incarcerated in the Chateau d’If on the island of Montecristo, I needed to find another relatable context for the message of flight.  That is what made me think about my upcoming flight to San Diego and what message it gives to me.

          To begin with, let’s dispense with the notion that I really have anything at all to complain about.  I clearly do not.  But we all live in our own worlds and our problems are our problems.  My problem with San Diego is that I am embarking on a change of life.  That is not a particular problem for me, I have lived my 65 years mostly on the run anyway, so change if more a friend than an enemy.  But I do worry about others who depend on me and first among those are my kids.  I was raised by a mother who kicked us all out of the nest after high school because she had flown her own nest at that time by choice and thought we were best served by doing likewise.  It never once implied less intimacy amongst us, we just learned how to be distantly intimate.  I am certain it will be even easier to be distantly intimate thanks to FaceTime and other great tools of modern life.  Modern travel is also much more routine than it was in my youth.  The question will be less about how often we can return than how often we and everyone else will optimally want us to return.         

          Ultimately, the message of flight for me is that I love change and travel and running away from things, whether they plague me or I just like running away to run away.  I also want to hit the road and feel the need to travel by car around the USA more than I have recently.  That is just another form of flight, but it all carries the same message.  I used to know a guy who was approaching 80-years-old who use to go visit five museums in a day.  He over-programmed himself and I used to think he was playing a version of “run for your life”.  As differently as we all may approach it, aren’t we all just running for our lives?