Thursday, September 1, 2011

In just two short weeks, we’ll be temporarily shuttering this parade of vowels, and it won’t be purely because I prefer consonants. The real reason? I’ll need to take a week off as I soar through the skies. Now, I don’t mean this in a Bette Midler, “Wind Beneath My Wings” capacity, so much as the fact that I’ll be strapped into “airplanes,” otherwise known as coffins with wings (and crunchy snacks), bound for Ft. Lauderdale and Indianapolis.

Normally, in a given calendar year, I’m fine with flying approximately once or not at all. But when corporate necessity beckons, I must heed the call, and so I find myself staring at back-to-back sky pilgrimages. Four lift-offs. Four landings. Paltry sums for any avid flyer, but for me, these are dalliances with disaster, overt flirting at an altitude of 20,000 feet with statistics I’d rather avoid entirely.

At the same time, though, I’m excited. You’ll recall it was just around this time last year when I embarked on a similar trip and began to adopt a new, more sociable persona. Maybe, just maybe, a similar degree of change awaits. Even if this isn’t the case, it’ll be interesting to revisit the same places with a fresh set of eyes. Oh, Lord. Was I just being optimistic? Perhaps a plane is a sky cocoon, then, rather than a coffin with wings, from which I’ll emerge a beautiful butterfly.