Tales from Oregon Pt. 1

Right now I'm sitting in front of my gate at Eugene Airport in Eugene, Oregon. My plane leaves in about an hour and a half. It's a very clean, very small airport and they have free public Wi-Fi which is ridiculously fast, so all-in-all I'm pretty happy right now. I love traveling of course, but its always nice to have the experience go smoothly without hectic lines and crowded terminals with crying babies. Damn those babies.

Alright, to avoid going off on a tangent about babies, I'll get straight to the point. For the last week I've been staying in Oregon with my estranged grandfather. When I arrived in Eugene last Monday and walked up to his car, I got the chance to see him for the first time in my entire life. This trip (paid for by him) is sort of a last-ditch effort to meet each other before he dies. He's 84 years old and physically quite frail. I can talk about him like this for hours, about what I learned and what I didn't learn, and whether or not my perception of him as a cowardly and selfish person who did little to support my mother growing up, and who divorced my grandmother as she laying dying in a hospital in order to marry the woman he had been having an affair with for years, has changed at all. I can talk about whether or not I was personally changed by this trip. And I plan to. Over the course of the next few days, I'll post up the entries I made in a journal I kept this week. I wrote down some of my thoughts, some of the stories he told me, and a whole lot of rambling. I'll edit it as I put it up, possibly differentiating the old from the new with bold formatting or something to that effect. Anyway, without any further ado, here is my first entry in this short Tales from Oregon series...

12/15/2008 (Monday)

This is a really clean plane. I’m on Delta Airlines Flight 1003 from JFK to Salt Lake City where I’ll catch my connecting flight to Eugene, Oregon. I planned on keeping a journal of sorts for this trip (I bought this writing pad specifically for that purpose a few weeks ago). However, I was on a roll with some Sudokus and probably wouldn’t have started writing at all if it hadn’t been for this girl sitting across the aisle from me. I have an aisle seat, and there’s a really, really thin guy sitting at my window. He’s kept it shut and is currently reading something with a full page black and white photo of Clint Eastwood on it. There’s no one in the seat between us, which is nice. I can put my laptop bag there (I don’t know why I brought my laptop, I have no idea if my grandfather is even aware of the existence of the internet), and have room in front of my own seat to stretch my legs. Across the aisle from me is a clean-looking guy with dark rimmed glasses and business pants. Another empty seat, and then the girl. She’s listening to an iPod and committing a lot of herself to scribbling furiously in a notebook full of yellowish unlined paper. She’s on her second pen now. A lock of hair keeps falling in front of her face which I imagine must be rather frustrating.

Having said all of this, I believe it’s important to note that I am not some hyper-observant creepy guy. I just get bored on planes quite easily. I can’t sleep and I’m forced to read or write or pretend to work on expert-level Sudokus. I’ve got my iPod on, lasting emo-rock from five years ago at a low murmur. All-American Rejects, Dashboard confessional, and some newer Jack’s Mannequin pay at the same volume as the cycling air conditioning system and the muted engines. I should point out that I enjoy flying immensely. I enjoy travel, and the feeling that accompanies watching the ground below sink into indistinguishable flecks of color. I like the transient in-between feeling I get at airports. I like to watch the baggage checkers and the TSA screeners do their things, seemingly numbed to the awe-inspiring concept of such expedited global connection. Of course, I am numbed much in the same way. I have to sit down and think about it before I realize how large and awesome we as humans have become; where we can hop on a plane and be thousands of miles away in just a few hours. But that’s the way with things. We grow comfortable with new ideas. I suppose this is good. If it wasn’t for eventual complacency, if we were continually amazed at our own inventiveness, at our own capacity for engineering our own miracles, we would grow stagnant, we would lose our desire to replace and reinvent.

Everyone tells me I should write. That’s what they tell me. “Andrew,” they say, in a tone that conveys authoritative guidance (occasionally bordering on patronizing), “You really have a gift. You should write.” I should write. I should write. I should write…what? There are moments where I enjoy writing, moments where the exhilarating feeling of being able to articulate your thoughts and emotions in a way that makes them accessible to everyone and anyone sweeps over me and I fall prey to notion of Romantic or transcendental thought. This seldom happens when I am writing something for class, and I seldom write anything outside of class, so I seldom experience this feeling. I’m not sure if I feel it right now, but I do know that my hand is cramping up, so I’m going to stop for now.

Now I’m on my flight to Eugene. The plane from Salt Lake City to Eugene was apparently delayed and then its engines broke and then they had to reroute another plane from Reno. So it ended up being about two hours late. However, I don’t think the time was wasted, because I got the chance to try out a new Odwalla drink, which is always an exciting experience for me.

I am sitting next to the girl I mentioned earlier. She sat down next to me as we were both waiting for the plane. Apparently we’re both headed to Eugene. We started talking. We’re still talking.