Eating the Elephant

 

Last month my husband and I went on a trip to the Holy Land with our parish, touring Israel and Jordan. The trip was amazing. We visited sites we’ve read about in the Bible and or have seen in movies, like Petra, the ancient city carved into rock facades, which was featured in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Among the places we visited were Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus and the site of the first Christmas. We also visited Nazareth, sailed on the Sea of Galilee and floated in the Dead Sea. We rode camels in Jericho, walked the Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Sorrows” in Jerusalem to Jesus’s Crucifixion site and entered the Holy Sepulcher, the empty tomb of Jesus.

In Jordan, we visited Mt. Nebo, not the one with Sam’s Club and Target, and the Roman ruins in Jerash. We saw Bedouins herding sheep in the desert, visited Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and placed prayers in the cracks of the Western Wall. It truly was the trip of a lifetime, and I encourage anyone who gets the chance to visit the Holy Land to do so.

 Sunrise over the Sea of Galilee, Tiberias, Israel

 

But then it was time to return home.

We left Jordan and did the complicated swap of having our bus driver and Jordanian guide transport us to the border, deposit us there to go through immigration, re-enter Israel, where an Israeli guide and bus driver picked us up and transported back to Jerusalem. We were having dinner in a hotel before our guide was to transport us to the airport for our flight from Tel Aviv to Newark and then on to Pittsburgh, when I thought to check on our flight status. When I saw a red warning that said “Canceled,” my heart sank. I asked if anyone else had checked the status, which prompted everyone to pull out their cell phones. Not only had our flight been canceled, but we had also been rescheduled on a later flight leaving Tel Aviv but terminating in San Francisco, making it a 15-hour flight. Then we had a seven-hour layover in San Francisco before departing on a connecting flight to Denver, and then flying back to Pittsburgh.

My husband and I had purchased preferred seats so that we could sit together, but the new flight had us both in middle seats-the worst possible places. A sense of desperation descended. I don’t sleep on planes. I didn’t think I could handle such an ordeal. We’d already been up 19 hours when we took off; all told, by the time we arrived home, I had been up for nearly 50 hours.

Many of you face or have faced far worse circumstances than travel troubles. I have a neighbor who had a health issue that left him in isolation for nearly a year until he received a bone marrow transplant. On the last leg of the trip, I sat next to an 81-year-old woman from West Virginia, who was flying back from visiting her grandchildren in Denver. She told me that when she was 27, her husband, who was a coal miner, had his skull crushed in a mining accident leaving her a widow with a two-year-old and new baby. She said she didn’t know how she made it through.

But I know how she did it, and anyone else facing dire, seemingly insurmountable circumstances, knows the secret. It’s the eating-the-elephant mindset. It was Desmond Tutu who said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.”

 

When I boarded that plane to come home, I tried to take it one hour at a time, one leg at a time, and find something good within each hour. I watched several movies and chatted a bit with my Israeli seatmate. In San Francisco, I had a delicious BLT sandwich, after no bacon for two weeks. And the lady from West Virginia was sweet and talking to her helped to pass the time. I never thought I’d be able to cope with being up 50 hours straight and being confined in a middle seat for 15 hours, and yet I did.

For any of you facing a challenge now or in the coming new year, remember to take it one small step at a time, find the good even in undesirable circumstances, and realize that you have more strength than you may realize. And before you know it, that elephant will be gone.

This originally appeared in the December Issue of Northern Connection Magazine.

Tales From the Middle Seat

Most people when they fly, avoid sitting the middle seat because you are trapped between the person sitting in the window seat and the person with the aisle seat. Since I am 5’3” and my husband is 6-feet tall, if we fly and the seating is three across, I’m often the passenger in the middle seat, giving him the aisle to stretch out a bit. I still prefer not to sit in the middle seat, but over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate it.

When we went to Hawaii in 1986, we picked up passengers in San Francisco before flying across the Pacific. My window seatmate was an elderly woman, dressed very dignified with white permed hair. As we prepped for takeoff, she touched my hand and then quickly apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m recently widowed, and whenever I flew before, I always held hands with my husband during takeoff. This is my first trip without him.”

I told her no need to apologize, and I learned that her name was Mrs. Maloney, and she was traveling solo to China to visit her son who was working there. We were only married four years then, and I thought her story bittersweet. 

To this day, when we take off, I hold my husband’s hand, and think of Mrs. Maloney.

About 10 years ago, I had the last-minute chance to accompany my husband on business trip to Las Vegas, and since it was impromptu, I had no choice of seat except the last row in the middle. My husband was five rows up on the aisle. This time my window seatmate, was a young Indian man. I don’t know how we got to talking, but we gabbed the four hours back to Pittsburgh. I learned that he was an engineer traveling on business and was deeply worried. He explained that the husbands of all his wife’s friends brought jewelry back for their wives when they traveled, but he was bringing his wife an expensive ceramic cooking knife. “She loves to cook,” he explained, “and I’m a practical man.” In effect, I told him to be himself and never compare yourself to others.

Not all flights have been as rewarding. I’ve sat next to huge men, who take over the arm rest and people who barely acknowledge your existence. Coming back from Alaska last fall, my seatmate by the window was a young teenage girl, who after takeoff, pulled up her hood, pulled her knees up, and wrapped herself in a blanket, like she was a human cocoon. She never moved the whole time from Seattle to Pittsburgh. I envied her bladder capacity.

My last trip is probably my most memorable. We just came back from a short getaway to San Antonio. The plane from Dallas to Pittsburgh was nearly full, and we were three rows from the back. Of course, I was in the middle seat and my husband was on the aisle. The window seat was still open and only a handful of passengers were making their way down the aisle. We were hoping no one would take the window so we could stretch out. Then suddenly a thirty-ish Asian man stopped in the row before us and pointed to the window seat as did his companion who right behind him claimed our window seat.

After saying “thank you” numerous times after creeping past us, my seatmate, looked at me and asked, “You Pittsburgh?” I told him I was going to Pittsburgh, and I asked where he was from. Through halting English and what looked like charades, I learned that he and his friend where from Japan and were working in Mexico and that his friend “Like Pittsburgh.” Which I discovered meant that they were going to the Pirates game. The friend held his phone up to me, saying. “Google tell me to go to Primanti’s.” I said yes, Primanti’s is an iconic restaurant in Pittsburgh, and that they put French fries on everything. My seatmate said something that sounded like “magnowas.” I shook my head that I didn’t understand. After several attempts, he finally raised his palm and traced a large “M” on it. He was speaking the international language of McDonalds! “Yes, like McDonald’s” I said. He tried to imitate my pronunciation of McDonald’s, and it sounded hideous. I hope I don’t sound like that; it sounded like I was retching. We all laughed and as we landed, I could hear his friend, like a little Eliza Doolittle, practicing saying the ‘rain in Spain lies mainly on the plain, repeatedly pronouncing Pre-Man-Tees over and over.

As we made our way down the gangway, we wished them safe travels, and my seatmate asked, “You been Japan?” I said no. He said, “You come. You have fun.”

I told him yes, I would like that, but I thought only if I’m in a middle seat for the flight, and I get to meet interesting people. 

 

Where Was I . . . Show Me the Way to Go Home

I grew up reading the late humor writer Erma Bombeck, and she authored a book in 1991 called When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It’s Time to Go Home. I wish she were alive to today to ask her: Where do you go when you look worse than your passport photo?

Last month my husband, two grown sons and I headed for what some have called “a trip of a lifetime,” but I refuse to call it that because it implies it was a one-and-done, and I want to go back. Anyway, we headed to Rome for three days and then a Mediterranean cruise. I prepped for months, and on departure day, I thought I looked Rome-ready. Italians embrace a concept known as bella figura, meaning “beautiful figure” or presenting your best image to the world. 

So, I did my best to live up their sartorial standards. I had applied my fake tan, had gotten my hair cut, had a pedicure, applied some press-on nails because gel nails often weaken my own nails, and on departure day, I donned my chic cheetah-print palazzo pants, black sweater and glitzy gold jewelry. My oldest son said I looked like Karen Hill from Goodfellas, which I wasn’t sure was good or bad. But what I do know is that it was all down hill from there. 

Our arrival in Rome. My sons and I in St. Peter's Square wearing my fashionable cheetah palazzo pants.  I'm sparing you the return photo.  Let's just say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed coming out of his spider hole would have had company😉

 My press-on nails didn’t make it through the security check at Pittsburgh International, so on the plane, I plucked off the six that remained. While shuttling my luggage, a bag shifted chipping my pedicure and hitting my instep. I didn’t think about that until logging 10 miles on our first full day in Rome, and my right foot swelled, giving it the appearance of an elephant foot. But the trip was incredible; besides Rome, we visited Florence, Nice, Monaco, Palma Majorca, Barcelona and Naples. I sweated off my fake tan in on the beach in Majorca, but other than being pale and gimpy, things looked pretty good—I had budgeted my wardrobe so that I had one clean outfit left to don to fly home.

We had to be off the ship by 7 a.m., so I was too lazy to put on makeup or curl my hair at such an early hour. What did I care? By that evening, we’d be back in Pittsburgh. To make room in my suitcase, I ditched my deodorant, which had crumbled, and pitched the squished tube of toothpaste, thinking what use could that little bit left in the tube do me? 

Don’t ever tempt the toothpaste gods!

Although our flight leaving Rome for Montreal was delayed, we had an empty plane allowing us to stretch out, and in my case, elevate my elephant limb and watch movies, but we missed our connecting flight to Toronto. The airline put us on a later flight that got us into Toronto with only minutes to spare before our flight left for Pittsburgh. We passed through Canadian customs and then a kind airport employee tried to help us get through U.S. customs quickly. He collected all our passports and had my oldest son process us through the automated kiosks while we stripped off shoes, belts, watches and Fitbits to pass through security.

Unfortunately, my husband’s shoe got trapped in the conveyor belt for a few moments, and after doing our best O.J. Simpson dash through the terminal sans shoes and accessories to the gate, they wouldn’t let us on the flight because our bags were still on the plane from Montreal, and the U.S. Border inspectors didn’t want to retrieve and clear them. This necessitated us going back through Canadian customs and being put up in a Toronto hotel overnight.

By the time we settled in, it was 12:30 a.m. eastern time, but by our Roman-adjusted body clock, it was 6:30 a.m., and we’d been up more than 24 hours. We had to get up three hours later for our flight to Pittsburgh.

The girl who had cultivated her bella figura, was flying home with teeth that felt like they had a velvet covering because I had no toothpaste, a swollen elephant foot and major bed head while wearing dirty clothes and smelling of Old Spice. Since I had no deodorant, I used my husband’s. (Manly, yes. But I like it too!)

By this time, I looked, smelled, and felt worse than my passport photo, and I don’t know what Erma would have prescribed, but I did the only thing that felt natural when I got home. I brushed my teeth, took a shower and headed for my bed!

This originally appeared in the October 2019 edition of Northern Connection magazine.