I'm back in France after a whirlwind two-week visit to the States for the holidays: week-long cabin trip with the entire family (17 people, including five babies/toddlers); staggered with lunch dates and coffee meetings with dear friends; research trips to library, errands; long talks, a walk in the park, and quality time with my love; restaurant visits (finally had that damn chicken sandwich!); necessary shopping (oh how very nice is the euro --> dollar exchange rate right now, even if it does threaten not to last); a spa visit for a massage; and TWO pedicures, because they just aren't the same in France. I even managed to fit in a three-mile run (thumbs up), but only one (thumbs down).
There is something to be said for returning to your home country after a certain time abroad - the longer the better. It's a surreal experience, because the more you grow accustomed to the formalities and customs and everyday mundane habits and operations of one country, the more you forget those of the other. On my return journey back to France, I quite appropriately began reading Bill Bryson's 1999 book, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, wherein he describes how very out-of-place he felt at "home" in America after having spent some two decades in Britain.
Nonetheless, my calm reading (well, it was more like muffled guffaws over Bill's hilarious observations about the differences between American vs. British cold medicine advertisements*) was interrupted rather brusquely by charging turbulence, as the tiny plane I had taken - my first Air Canada flight ever, and quite possibly my last - was buffeted and thrown across the winter skies between Atlanta and Toronto. I was supposed to catch a correspondance from Toronto to Paris, but I began to wonder if I would ever see the outside of a plane again. In a stroke of particularly ill timing, I glanced down to the security fact sheet located on the famous "seat back pocket" of the seat in front of me, and noted without amusement that the plane I was currently rocketing through infinity in had been unwisely named a "Bombardier CRJ". Now reader, I ask you, given the security threats associated with flying today, not the least of which is being hurtled through space at lightning speed by Jack Frost's mighty blow, would it be comforting at all to you to know you were being transported in an aircraft that was probably conceived during World War II as a bombing vessel, and that had quite possibly not been updated since then? I mean, who names these things?
The constant churn of the engines interrupted my thoughts as the little battered plane chugged bravely through the cold night. Every few pages, I was jolted out of Bill's humour by a sudden panic that I was about to lose my life. Each time, I would glance nervously around the cabin, only to note that the passengers seemed blissfully unaware of the danger. Something along the lines of "Seriously, how can you people READ at a time like this?!" popped into my head. But their calm indifference caused me to chicken out on asking the guy sitting next to me to hold my hand as we went down. Finally, the plane began to descend towards Toronto. The closer we got to the ground, the fiercer and stronger the wind became, and the more perilous our position seemed. Each blow sent the plane shooting to the right or the left, and sometimes spun us a bit, as well. My eyes darted around me to see if the other passengers were clinging for dear life to each other. More than a few seemed a bit worried, but the girl across the aisle from me continued reading her book, whose existential title seemed to mock me. When we finally touched down in icy, cold Toronto, I was seriously regretting the in-flight dinner I'd partaken of, and I think I have never been so happy to be alive in my entire life.**
*Excerpt from Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself:
"An advertisement in Britain for a cold relief capsule [...] would promise no more than that it might make you feel a little better. You would still have a red nose and be in your pajamas, but you would be smiling again, if wanly. A commercial for the selfsame product in America, however, would guarantee total, instantaneous relief. A person on the American side of the Atlantic who took this miracle compound would not only throw off his pj's and get back to work at once, he would feel better than he had for years and finish the day having the time of his life at a bowling alley."
**If you think I'm being melodramatic, I invite you to read up a bit on the Bombardier CRJ.
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