Return to Sedona

Waiting for Flight Vignette

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Travel refreshes, and brings so many new notions, people and ideas to write.

It may have been a black mood brought on by sleeplessness or
accumulated fatigue rising past the tide of adrenaline.

The Dallas/Fort Worth layover dumped us into a deserted airport about
three in the morning: there were no airline clerks, no shops open, no
people beyond the wandering zombies like me, stumbling around and
hoping to locate the Arrivals/Departures kiosk to direct us to
connecting flights.

I was furious at Spirit Airlines for too many individual frauds and
assaults to describe, even as a simple bulleted listing that would
consume the rest of the story and accomplish nothing.

Rather, to concentrate on a few, happier vignettes would seem the more
productive course.

The first involves a laughing woman whom I have know since grade
school, and who has always been a friend. She dated my best friend,
and served the purpose of village yenta over the years, in the
dwindling village of former classmates, now strewn to the four winds
by fifty and sixty years of living.

My best buddy, whom she dated in school had long since passed,
and she lives alone, working among a much younger staff at UPS Phoenix.
Her workmates know she is older, and they speculate.

“Forty-five?” one of them asked recently.

She shook her head.

“OK, forty-seven, then.”

This silently amuses her as it is off by several decades and she knows
better than to enlighten them.

With her in the shipping business and me in wine, the antics and scams
of winery shipping offer a few moments’ amusement.

At any rate, I had reserved the Arizona Shuttle from Sedona back to
Phoenix PHX, and found myself engaging three New Englanders,
Massachusetts natives, in small talk to help the night hours through
the desert pass.

The ladies behind us were yoga instructors visiting Sedona for a meeting.

“...well, I have been traveling quite a lot lately: LA, Mexico...,” I
heard in the dark behind us.

“Wow. I was, like, traveling in India (like), alone...”

“You went to India on your own?”

“...when the taxi (like) ended up in (like) an area that was, like,
hours from anywhere...”

“Well?”

“I have never been so, like, fearful. The driver could have done
(like) anything, and no one would (like) know...”

The generations to which each instructor belonged, were easily
distinguished despite the darkness of the shuttle...

Up front, an elderly CPA returning to Cape Cod to sell his house, was
describing he and his wife’s troubles with javelinas in the new Sedona
home. Chris, the shuttle driver chimed in when the conversation turned
that curious urban myth that most people abducted by aliens, had green
eyes.

It took hours, and my weariness from working the high altitude
vineyards around Cottonwood and Sedona, stole what was left of sense
of humor.

I was leaning on the anti- collision post under a sign that read
“Terminal 2: Spirit” suddenly aware how completely insane the plan had
been. My high school friend had been convinced of the soundness of my
proposal to meet me at PHX for a few hours while I sat waiting for a
2:00 AM flight.

The bargain we struck, although I admit it did not take much arm
twisting on either side, was, I bring the wine from Page Springs Cellars; she would bring brie, a baguette and the fixings for a picnic.

As I was using the post to prop myself up from falling asleep, it occurred to me that a European style wine party late on a Sunday night might not be welcome from the TSA or airport officials, even if we managed to sneak the wine and goodies past security cameras.

By then, it was after ten Sunday night, and I knew Bordy was on her way, but confounded by highways, arrival gates, parking, passing airport shuttle buses, security and police agents walking the premises...

“...hey, nice boots!” shouted next to my ear from behind, shocked me
out of my stupor suddenly, and the obvious took my clouded judgement a
moment or two to process.

“Bordy!” I gasped.

It had been six years since I stayed with her overnight on arrival for
my first wine internship in Camp Verde.

“Look, this is nuts...” I began with a weary yawn. “How ‘bout, I just
gift you the bottle and we go get pancakes at IHOP...”

She grinned her impish grin: she was having none of it.

From the fact that she seemed to be dragging twice as much luggage as
I had, she had taken seriously my description of the wine (51% petite
syrah, 39% syrah, 8% counoise, and 2 %...er, malvasia...).

Malvasia?

“You put 2% white malvasia, in this severely dark red blend?” I had
asked the new winery sous chef who had sometimes been involved with
winemaking. “That would make it...?”

“Yeah, well, the others are tannic: you need cheese with some heavy
fat to soak up the tannins and...” she continued, fisted hand resting
on one hip, head wrapped in a bandana, with attitude.

I had passed Brynne’s suggestions to Bordy by text: brie; or
gorgonzola; or Stilton (whew!), anything with a seriously unhealthy
level of fat. Brynne had also recommended stopping by Trader Joe’s
where the various components of haute cuisine could be had for a song.

I became nervous.

“And...” Bordy continued now that I was fully alert, “...I brought
Tupperware...”

The comment didn’t not register until we bought a compulsory cheap
soda, enough to justify unpacking the sumptuous picnic on the cafe
tables before one of those ridiculously expensive fast food kiosks
where the meager offerings are valued by their weight in gold bullion.

It made me nervous, the way the security guard at the TSA station
across the arrivals hall was eyeing us.

“Wait here,” she says as I am cutting the brie with a plastic knife,
and putting sausage sized medallions onto lovely blue checker
patterned salad plates.

Off she walks with a large handbag and I notice my wine is missing.

In my exhausted befuddlement, I missed her plot to empty the wine
bottle into a Tupperware carafe to disguise its contents as, say,
grape juice, which was a convenient fiction that was not completely
devoid of accuracy.

After she had disappeared, I watch a woman in a white uniform blouse
with epaulets and dark uniform slacks, cross the floor toward the
Ladies’ room, with the official, urgent stride of an officer closing
in.

I sat fumbling with my wallet: did I have enough cash to bail Bordy
out of arrest if it came to that? The large hand bag, as I suddenly
realized the unreality of the scene taking place, the way Bordy looked
this way and that to see if the coast was clear…

A moment later, she sits across the cafe table, we are enjoying our
first sips of grape juice, and she fills me in.

“No, she was just there to clean the ladies Room”.

We laugh and continue on with what was to be several hours’ near
drunken merriment over who has lived, who has died, who loved whom,
how the junior high coach had lined up all the adolescent school boys
without bathing suits on the pools’ edge, and the parallel fact that
the junior high girls’ tank top swimming suits fit neither Debbie
Westcott nor Trudy Teutsch, but for opposite anatomical reasons.

Bordy and Debbie, both of whose surnames began with an identical
letter that consigned each to the same home room, were best friends.

Bordy began with her tale.

“...well, I had turned around in class and was gossiping with Debbie,
and she silently moved her eyes and shook her head discreetly. Moose
Parker, the history teacher, was approaching from the front of class,
but I didn’t see him...and...”

Reading Debbie’s gestures, Bordy had swung around abruptly, her nose
colliding with the Moose’s hand, and spilling forth a cascade of blood,
all the way down the hall, Moose continually apologizing, toward the
school nurse’s station.

“I don’t think he was there the next year,” she concluded.

I remembered the terror that had coursed through my adolescent veins
at one of Debbie’s parties. She was daughter to a dentist, and
somewhat notorious for her lights-out parties.

It was just these same natural endowments of the girls’ swimsuit fame,
that Debbie pressed on me in the darkness to the crooning of Bobby
Vinton or the Lettermen at one of her parties. At age thirteen or
fourteen, some boys panic at close quarters.

As we mature, we learn that such feminine attention and direct contact
may be better received after a word or two of conversation, or perhaps
a joke.

For many years, I deeply regretted my discomfort. I don’t recall
having had a single conversation with her, and for years later, the
first one I looked for at class reunions was Debbie, to verify or
refute adolescent fantasies stemming from the grip of that first
terror in the darkness.

My wristwatch interrupted our mirth at all this, enough to cause a
blurring of eyes and a wiping of tears.

My two bags’ luggage was incongruously topped with a pair of neatly
folded, brand new blue jeans which I had intended to change into, but
for which, as it turned out, there had been no room inside the
carriers.

Bordy insisted in unzipping the bags, digging through all my personal
and intimate belongings and repacking it all until, bulging at the
seams, it all fit.

I regarded this with admiration and gratitude until we reached
check-in when I realized in her enthusiasm and irresistible maternal
urges, my boarding code had been misplaced.

It was a mere fifteen minutes before my 2:00 AM departure and I couldn’t find the
seven-letter code that would allow me to print the boarding pass...the
fact that the wine bottle, or more accurately, the Tupperware box,
was empty and my state near exhaustion, did nothing for my reflexes
under pressure...

(...to be continued...)