The Visible Woman...May 18, 2002

In the Austin airport, I notice that all the flag mugs are marked down to 99 cents. Our patriotism is waning in the shops we encounter after getting patted down and treated like criminals. And, yes, I got patted down in Austin. Take the shoes off, yada yada. I'm tired of removing my laptop from its protection. The battery got rattled out this time. I had trouble getting the patter to give me, the pattee, clear view of my possessions while she worked. Thieves are the biggest worry here. People are constantly leaving stuff behind, judging from the announcements over the PA. Does showing a Driver's License not once, not twice but three times help?

I got a coffee while waiting in the Austin airport and a woman asks me where I got it. She then put her stuff down by the seat between me and another woman. I figure she is with this other woman. But she comes back and thanks me for watching her stuff. Which I hadn't been doing but no harm done.

I am endlessly entertained by watching people. Give me a seat with a passing parade of folks and a cup of coffee and I'll likely never get bored. On the actual airplane, I need entertainment as I quickly tire of the people actually next to me. Some crossword puzzles clipped from newspapers and an old Harper's magazine provided this on the way from Dallas to San Diego. The magazine was from December. It provided a bunch of good reading including a review of a book by Evan S. Connell. Who, I find out, wrote Mrs. Bridge (and Mr. Bridge). From which come the movie starring Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Hmm...I liked that movie. Maybe I'll get a DVD of it. All of which is to offer you this quote from the article:

I'm on an MD-80 from Dallas to San Diego. That's a two-seat/three-seat arrangement. I'm in the aisle seat on the two. That's good. But the guy next to me, a forty-fifty-something guy, thin with a pock-marked face, is sniffing.

"Oh, good," I think. "I'm going to catch a cold from him." I silently think that I'm happy I took Echinecea for a couple of days before traveling. I get a diet drink. It's still early. My seat companion gets two vodka tonics.

I work crossword puzzles and read a magazine, ignorning the sniffing. Soon my companion becomes agitated. He grabs the headrest in front of him and peers up the aisle. He stretches up and twists around to look back down the aisle.

"OK," I think, "Surely he isn't a terrorist about to make his move on two vodka tonics. He must need to go to the head." I'm ready for a bit of relief from morning coffee so I get up to give him a chance to get up also, since he hasn't said a word to me. When I return, it appears that he hasn't budged. He's still peering around. Soon I know why. They come back with the drink cart and he gets two more vodka tonics! Well, vodkas. The can of tonic is holding up fine, thanks.

After he finishes those, he squirms and sniffs some more. I don't notice when he hits the attendant call, but one arrives to switch it off.

"Two vodka tonics," he says.

"We only have one left," says the flight attendant, "But it's OK because we will be landing in a few minutes."

Yes, he walked off the plane. He veered left when I went right to baggage claim but later appeared on the curb with a bunch of luggage. Maybe he stopped off at a bar? In an case, I turned my head, afraid I'd see him walking toward the rent-a-car vans.

On the way home I took a commuter jet to LA and the direct flight home to Austin. Sitting in the 'Chili's, Too' at the LA Airport at nine in the morning, drinking a Virgin Mary, I saw one woman downing a shot of something and another downing a beer. Fear of flying?

I call Mom a few times from San Diego. She visits the pulmonary guy who informs her that the thing isn't growing in her lung. She goes to Physical Therapy and gets some exercises which she is doing, she says. But she can't go back as long as she has pain from the shingles, she says. Or until the burn she got from the heating pad heals. She has an appointment with the GP to see what he says. Dad is trying to make her do things. When a woman visits on Thursday night who lived near us on the farm years ago, she manages to go out to eat. But she says she doesn't think she will go to church on Sunday.

I think I've had it with conferences like these. My enthusiasm is waning. For lots of reasons. One night, I get a nice meal in La Jolla with a customer and a view of the ocean thanks to a director who had a rental car. I get a so-so meal at the Chart House with a gaggle of customers/prospects and company folk. (Fixed menus aren't a good thing. It's not that I'm picky, but it eliminates the really good stuff unless you like steak. Or the one fish choice.) The guys near me are friendly enough and it's not unpleasant just not a lot of fun.

I got two medium walks during the week and was mostly in the hotel the rest of the time. One, from the hotel to the passenger ship terminal in a dreary almost mist, gave me a nostalgia for traveling for fun. Especially seeing the giant cruise ship and some old boats made into museums.

I overheard two homeless people outside Ralph's, a high end grocery store:

Hip huggers are in, I notice. I catch up with fashion on trips. To achieve the effect some gal I saw at baggage claim in Austin has trimmed off the waistband, in fact trimmed everthing down to that yoke seam in back. Hmm...

I brought some of the sunny cool weather back with me. FFP and I walked up to a street design demo this morning where neighbors, bikers, walkers and general curmudgeons argued about the neighborhood on a blocked-off part of Shoal Creek. The options have grown more reasonable if not entirely acceptable.

FFP and I took a walk in 'near campus' neighborhood. We saw nice houses and hovels. And a house I call 'log house.' Firewood is stacked outside in such quantity and such an arrangement that you know that the occupant has an obsession for logs much as the 'chicken bones and newpapers' folks have for their saved detritus. This person's thing could be more easily understood if we had a cold climate! A mangy chow emerged from the back into the fenced front yard to bark at Chalow. Chalow got some 'C level' pictures taken with graffiti near the condos where Michael Dell lived when we met him. She hasn't really reclaimed her freedom. I brushed out the leash. What comment she's making on 'no World Trade Organization' I don't know.

We went to 34th Street Deli for some lunch, picked up some steaks at Cooper's for dinner and went home to do some actual work. I did, too. Did some of the stuff that I should have done in the evening in San Diego when, instead, I mindlessly watched TV or slept.

At six o'clock I thought it was four and thought I'd attack the paper piles. Our friend and bookkeeper Gayle called and said she was late. She was coming with some sides for the steak to share dinner with us.

We had a nice dinner, watching a Lyndon Johnson thing on HBO to please FFP. I watched some of the TCM Woody Allen fest, enjoying a three-foot high stack of New York Times, Wall Street Journals and Austin American-Statesmans. Another thing I dislike about traveling to convention hotels is that they give you that free newspaper, USA Today. It is a poor excuse for a paper, but it has a very difficult crossword. Just seeing it reminds me that I'm away from home, working. Naturally if you've ever been to Austin, you are thinking how bad our local paper is. But it's better than the USA Today. At least we get local dot.com horror stories, local obits and reviews of local entertainment and food.

Saturday, May 18, 2002