9/8/01
5:06 pm mountain time
Denver-Stapleton airport

My flight to Minneapolis was canceled, as I found out when I walked into the terminal at Denver today. The next flight out, the nice lady behind the counter told me in a I’m really sorry to have to tell you this voice, was leaving at 7:00 pm.

I glanced at the clock above her head. 2:18 pm.

“That’s fine,” I said. What else could I do? I was not going to get on an earlier flight—there were no earlier flights to be had. I walked into the terminal, sat down, and pulled out my cell phone and called my parents and G, telling my parents that I’d been delayed and wouldn’t be calling to check in tonight, telling G that I wasn’t sure when I’d arrive but I’d call him when I did.

Then wandered up and down the terminal, enjoying my calm. I had five hours to kill, I didn’t feel like leaving the airport, and though I do, in fact, have acquaintances in the area, I don’t know any of their numbers offhand and wouldn’t dream of interrupting their Saturday to ask them to entertain me.

I walked down to the bookstore, and picked up copies of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Cherry, as I’d already read the two new books I’d packed in my carryon. I parked myself for a while on a mezzanine, sitting at a table with nobody around, but too soon the fact that there was nobody around unnerved me. It was a public place, and if something were to happen, there would be nobody around—-

I realized that the fearful echoes bouncing around in my brain were of my father’s voice. He and my mother worry about me. My father lectured me endlessly about being safe and careful on the road. I held my tongue and failed to point out that I am, after all, an adult, and have been making road trips alone and with company for two years now. I am canny, and careful, and keep myself safe. I’ve never believed that the universe is a friendly place, and take care in it.

I decided, after telling the voice of my father in my head to fuck off for a while, that I was hungry, and I was overdue for my noon meds anyway. I walked down to a food court, bought a cheese steak sandwich, which was pretty good, though overly greasy. I assumed that was part of the charm of this particular sandwich.

After eating, I walked down to the gate, sat myself down, and finished Girl With a Pearl Earring. Then I sat, looked out at the sky which was clearing after raining all afternoon, and thought about returning.

Returning to the scene of the crime, as they say. Returning to a place that had been my home for four years, that I had been overly eager to flee. I haven’t been there for three years now. I’m not sure what I expect to find—there are few people there I want to see, a few old haunts that I want to revisit, a few houses I need to show up on the doorsteps of.

(There is a sparrow in the aisle of seats next to me. She’s hopping around, pecking at the carpet. About the last thing I expected to see here. There, she just stretched herself up to peer out the window. Such a funny little sight here in this huge sterile place.)

Maybe I want to prove that I’ve changed, that I’ve grown up beyond the little town that I grew up in with all the explosive vigor of the late bloomer. Maybe I want to find out what the place is like now that I’m older, now that I have a car.

Or maybe it’s as simple as me wanting to touch base, however briefly, with a place that changed me as profoundly as I’ve ever been changed.

Then, too, I want to see Ragged Robin, feeling myself drawn to her relentlessly. I miss the girl, badly.

(Ooooo. Cute girl at two o’clock. Buzzed hair, low boots, denim pants rolled almost to the knees, backpack with a "Jobs for Justice" button on it. Definitely a crunchy granola dyke. I wonder if she’s going out or going home. It looks, at least, like she’s on my flight.)

But as I was saying. There are altogether too many miles between us, this girl who I fell in love with in that irreversible sort of way and me, the girl who ran so far to the west that she almost fell off the continent.

I’m not looking for a conclusion, to anything. I just want to see her so badly that my teeth ache.

There are portions of this trip that I’m not looking forward to, though. I don’t really want to see what my grandmother has become, what has happened to her since her fall down the stairs a year and a half ago. She evidently has good days and bad, and I can only hope to catch her on one of the good ones.

I have never been close to my grandmother, though I remember adoring her as a youngster, until I began looking inside of myself and discovering a call to a different religion than the one my parents were raising me in. I was, unfortunately, one of the golden children. Sarie and I were going to succeed, we were going to change the world, because the Millering girls are bright and ambitious, much more so than the boys, so the family lore goes.

Because of this, Sarie and I have also never been close—she and my brother were thick as thieves, though, and her brother Mark and I were left to fend for ourselves, which we did, separately.

Sarie grew up and everyone started calling her Sara, and she went to a college near her hometown and dropped out of school to get married young. The burden of being the ambitious one falls all on my shoulders, now. Which is funny because I am the alien child, the changeling, much like my cousin Mark. He and I are far more alike than we care to admit, under the skin. We both inherited grandma’s moodiness and tendencies towards depression, and we both occasionally look as if we were dropped by accident from another planet into this one. His features are far more pronouncedly elfin than mine, and he, too, is secretive and shy.

But he is not expected to be ambitious, merely to train in a trade, get married, and have babies. They always let me know that I was expected to do better than that.

Though I know my grandmother loves me, it is as if she loves a stranger—the funny looking girl with short hair that stuck out everywhere and a tendency to be self-absorbed and quiet. I have no idea what she thinks of the grownup me, if she thinks of the grownup me at all. I am told she spends much of her time wandering in the past. In the first few days after she woke from her coma after the fall, she thought I and my brother were her two children.

I will not have the heart to take her hands and say, I am not Kristie. Kristie died long, long ago.

I do not know if she will know me, now. There is so little in my adult self of that skinny little girl that I was, all elbows and huge green eyes. I do not know what worlds she inhabits, now.

I know this, and I fear, but I will go. Because as we all know, she is dying. She might die tomorrow, or she might die a year from now, but this is probably the last time I will see her alive.

Would it be better to not see her and remember her as she last was, a frail but still active woman? Or as the bed-bound woman I am about to go visit?

I don’t know.

It is terribly, tremendously, sad.

finally took off from Denver a little while ago. As we rose through the cloud layer, the sun was setting off to my left, setting the tops of the clouds on fire, a white and gold and red cotton-puff landscape. We passed a single raincloud, tendrils of moisture draped from it like some improbable jellyfish, tentacles too fine to be seen by the naked eye.

My rowmate is older than I am and talkative, with a daughter who works in Denver and who was flying standby. She and I discussed the flight and the cancellation of the previous one for a bit, and I told her I was going to visit family. Fortunately, she seems content to leave me in silence after the initial conversation.

I’m in what they call economy plus class. I’m not sure what this means, other than the fact that the seats are actually more comfortable than the norm. (I heartily recommend United for those of us who have wider-than-skinny hips. I’ve been so much more comfortable on this flight than I was a few weeks ago on Northwest.) I’m in a bulkhead row, so I can stretch out, and the plane isn’t nearly full so there wasn’t any worry about how to stow the two bags.

I like sitting here, tapping away at the laptop. I feel very grown-up. This is good, because I have this feeling I’ll get hassled much less at the car rental counter if I both look and feel like a grownup. I have problems envisioning myself as an actual grownup, even now; even owning a house and a car and having what is an admittedly cool job, I still feel like an overgrown teenager.

The light off to the west is fading, and an anvil-shaped cloud is silhouetted against the deep orange sky. Beautiful. I’m glad I still have it in me to notice these things, after all this time. I have gone too long unamazed by the world around me and the way everything is infused with joy.

How long has it been since I have gone out of my way to seek out beauty? I have no idea. I feel starved for it, my eyes begging me to show them something, anything, as long as it pleases the soul.

It has been almost as long since I have had the chance to write like I am writing now, everything simply flowing out of my fingers and onto the keyboard. Not worried about time constraints, I know I’ll be on the ground long before the battery on the laptop runs out, and I’ll be able to recharge them overnight.

It’s a luxury, to write like this. I have missed it. My fingers feel clever, as if they’re writing by themselves.

It occurs to me that I have been dancing too long to other people’s tunes. Maybe it’s time I lived for a while just to please myself.

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