The Blue Hat on the Security Belt

My ritual goodbye to a place I’ve just traveled to, while waiting for the third leg of my flight from Venice to New Orleans. So thanks to England for the public footpaths and beans for breakfast and flapjacks and a language I could mostly speak and learning how to enjoy mist, drizzle and rain while walking and the long, literary history from children’s books to adult ones that shaped my imaginative life

 

And goodbye to Italy, the ever-present pizzas and Tyrolean town names in Italian and German and the majesty of the Dolomites and the myriad bike paths through woods, fields, alongside rivers and highways. And the remarkable variety of memorable places I’ve been to in my traveling life—Venice, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Cinqueterra, Assissi, Bologna, Puglia, Sicily and now, the Dolomites. 

 

And hello to Newark Airport, some 20 minutes from my childhood home and the familiar New York skyline and Budweiser beer plant and American English and paying in dollars and some sense of returning home, even though it is frayed with the ambivalence of our worst overshadowing our best. Gifted a first-class seat for this last flight to New Orleans after awakening at 3:30 am in Venice. The miracle and privilege of flying and after a long, long, long line for connecting passengers and three more lines to show passports in Brussels, wondering if my patience for plane travel is waning. But after an exit row seat in Brussels with two-good movies and a good book and some needed sleep and this last first-class leg, maybe I’ll keep on flying and assuage my carbon footprint guilt with some 50 years of mostly being a vegetarian. 

 

Ready to put my teacher hat on again and that includes the literal blue cap that my colleague James publicly gifted me with two years ago in the NOLA Jazz Course. It would  have been lost on the Security belt without me noticing if some kind woman hadn’t alerted me that it had fallen off. Affirming my belief that angels are everywhere.