Airplanes, Smoke and Cattle Panel


From 30 thousand feet above the earth, it’s easy to feel as if you are only observing your life.  You see the rooftops and the tiny orange rectangles sitting side by side that you know must be school buses, filled that morning with children carrying peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and dulled pencils and homework they begrudgingly finished the night before.  And there are the parents in their desks that you can’t see, typing and calling and moving money from one pocket to another, but rarely their own.

It’s easy this far above the ground to regret that you could only have one child – not because you are greedy, but because you love the one you do have so much, you wish you could give her the one thing she wants most – companionship.  And you think of your own sisters, how growing up with them had somehow prepared you to play well with others in adult life.  But even then, sometimes you still act like a jerk.

That’s probably normal, and something, from 30 thousand feet in the air, you can cry silently about while hiding your face in the tiny bright rectangle of the airplane window.  The friendly stewardess brings you black coffee and a napkin that says, Great Taste is Timeless. 

Timeless.  You look at your hands and wonder if they look older or younger than you actually are.  You can’t tell.  These are the first hands you’ve ever seen that are exactly this old.  Today.  Tuesday.  On an airplane.  Passing through time zones; therefore, hands from the past and the future.

And when you think you might cry the 1200 miles to Georgia, you see smoke below, white puffs issuing from the center of a grove of trees so far below they have become a single, dark organism.  And you wonder about the smoke and the fire and if you should be concerned, if anyone other than you knows about it.  But fire is a natural thing you rationalize, something we light to clear away the dead stuff, or light throughout the short time our feet are earthbound to remind us that we are alive, on fire for something, a light for something else – for a hand that reaches out in the night flaming, reminding.  For the rising plume of breath you release above you until you are out of it, and you bend back into the ash, breathless and used up entirely.

So you rewire your thoughts to the small, certain things you see in front of you.  A cup of black coffee.  These hands, whatever age they are.  The kindness of the stewardess. 

Earlier, at the terminal, you opened your laptop and the page still open on the screen showed search results for “cattle panel.”  You tore off another piece of homemade banana bread and thought about how comfortable your tennis shoes are.  You liked your sweatshirt.  Your ponytail.  And suddenly it was okay to be who you are.  In fact, it was kind of nice.


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