Tag: New Delhi

Come Fly With Me

Today’s writing prompt: What is something you would attempt, if you were guaranteed not to fail?

What wouldn’t I attempt? Without question, the biggest challenge I would tackle would be to become a pilot. The urge to travel and fly was in me from an early age.

At 17, I applied to be an airline stewardess with a small regional airline in the Eastern part of Canada. The rejection letter was partly disappointing and partly heartening. I was too young to be hired they told me. But they encouraged me to apply again when I turned 19.

As fate would have it, by the time I was 19, I had been accepted at university. That sealed my fate for the following four years and many years that followed. Still, I worked in a good deal of flying in those university years.

I travelled twice to Europe twice between academic semesters. At the end of third year, I spent a summer in Egypt on a student seminar with about 50 other Canadians.

Following graduation, I travelled to Asia and throughout Sri Lanka, India and Nepal. You may have read of my trek through the Himalayas .

My husband was a commercial airline pilot. The irony and suitability of our union has not been lost on me. While I was schlepping from country to country on this airline or another as a passenger, he was actually flying the planes. Our paths never crossed in those days but we laugh at the possibility that they certainly might have.

My husband was a pioneer in the age of commercial flight. He flew for Pan American World Airways for 20 years until its’ untimely demise in 1991. The death of that iconic airline marked a sea change in the history of aviation.

Pan Am set the bar for class, luxury and service. I marveled that prime rib roast was not only served at seat side in Pan Am’s first class section, but had been roasted in the airline galley. Passengers got to choose their preferred cut. The wine selection rivaled a 5-star Michelin restaurant. Caviar was a standard “appetizer.”

My husband tells stories of the many glamorous passengers he ferried back and forth across the oceans. Elizabeth Taylor. Maggie Smith (who hated to fly). Flip Wilson (funny as hell.) Duke Ellington (wore a dewrag.) Burt Lancaster (shorter than he looked onscreen).

In one poignant story about a stewardess he tells how excited she was to serve Rock Hudson in first class. But her heart quietly broke after sharing her excitement with her galley colleagues. It was only then she learned Hudson’s male travel companion was also his boyfriend.

I had heard of Pan Am off in the distance. Ephemerally. I never flew on it. As a Canadian, we had other choices for European and international travel. It is my loss. The Pan Am logo on the side of a 747 was an iconic symbol in countless movies and TV shows. My husband refers to the cockpit of a 747 as his “office.”

Pan Am stories still drift through the world and are recounted by many people we meet – whether travelers or employees, always recounted with a certain wistfulness and joy. Pan Am employees seemed to universally love working at Pan Am.

My husband’s stories are full of glamor and fun they had both on the aircraft and during layovers. Pan Am employees believed – it is said – that “the world is my oyster.” When Pan Am declared bankruptcy in 1991, and went out of business, some employees committed suicide.

There are still Pan Am clubs in many places where there are still enough ex-employees to justify them. There is a Pan Am museum in Florida. You can still buy Pan Am “merch” and memorabilia online.

Today there are many female commercial airline pilots. Had I been born later, I might have been one of them. My husband and I often talk about the unlikelihood of our meeting in the first place. It was on an online dating site, not a normal domain for either of us. I was in Canada. He was in the US.

Along with the mysteries of falling in love, we talked with familiarity about restaurants and sites we saw in Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Rome, Paris, Munich and many other international capitals. In one conversation, he finally gave up asking me which countries I had visited: “This might go faster if you just tell me which countries you haven’t visited.” It still makes us chuckle.

No chance of failure? I’d be in a flight simulator somewhere in a New York minute. I’d abandon a lot of other dreams to pursue the goal of becoming a pilot.

And who knows? I ain’t dead yet. The game isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Of course, that phrase means one should not presume to know the outcome of an event which is still in progress.

Which is – in this case – my life.

So we’ll see.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I’d like to say all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go. I’m not. That is what I will do today.

I used to love travel. I remember the excitement in getting ready for a big trip. And there were some very big trips in my life.

From my home base in Canada, I flew to Sri Lanka for a three month walking trek and sojourn through India and Nepal. On another occasion, I flew to Seoul Korea to connect with my family on tiny and dazzling beautiful black sand Jeju Island off South Korea’s coast.

Then there was the southern sojourn to Argentina to take a ten day horse trek across the Andes. And I once flew due North and landed in Iqaluit, Nunavut for several frost filled days to attend the Arctic Winter Games.

Many writers laud the benefits of travel. I do. It changes you. It broadens your perspective on so many things. It can shatter the illusion of cultural superiority that some secretly harbor if they have not travelled very far from their home base.

One look at a carved monument in almost any country should knock that out of your system pretty quickly. Not always, of course. But often.

Travel is a kind of education that you cannot replicate by reading books. Books stimulate the imagination. Travel stimulates the senses. Nothing could replace the overwhelming sights and sounds of a spice market in New Delhi, India.

Celebrating Holi, the festival of colors, is one of the most unique occasions I’ve ever taken part in. In under an hour, me and my traveling companions were physically drenched in a dozen colors from handfuls of special chalk thrown at us. Deliberately!

As you wander the streets of New Delhi (or anywhere in India on that unique, special holiday), everyone is equally streaked with multiple colors of dust.

Indians generally have a great sense of occasion. Nothing can match the style and splendor of an Indian wedding drenched in rich fabrics, brilliant colors and enticing smells.

When most of my college buddies were working at traditional summer jobs after the term was over, I spent every summer traveling on some pretense or another. Europe. First as a waitress in a massive tourist hotel and the following summer as a student. Then Egypt as a student after my third year.

After graduation, I spent several months traipsing through Asia. So many indelible memories. So much experience and learning – mostly good.

I am leaving my country again. This time, on a more permanent basis. We cannot predict the future with flawless accuracy but we can make some educated guesses.

For me that means the next few years will be spent among my continent mates directly to our South. Living in the USA at this juncture in history is an ongoing daily education. I won’t make a qualitative call on what I’m learning there.

Travel brings you home with new eyes. You see everything that was familiar and there before but differently somehow.

It is easy for me to appreciate the old song, “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree?” Travel was like an addiction where the more I did it, the more I craved. I deemed it a healthy addiction and only now see the cravings diminishing somewhat.

Hours from now, I’ll be winging my way South to rejoin my husband and put this country in the rearview mirror for awhile.

When the jet place departs, I fully expect my bags to be packed and ready to go.

As ready as I’ll ever be at any rate.

What’s Your Happy Place?

I recently had cause to think back on some of the places in the world – my world – where I was most happy. Certainly, they were nearly all beautiful and peaceful. But not always. Some were surprisingly comfortable and comforting in unusual ways. I remember happy places where I felt most safe and most seen.

A box of lifejackets, for instance. Traveling as a teenager between Newfoundland and the mainland, I had barely been able to pay the fare for the trip let alone pay extra for sleeping accommodations.

Traveling “suiteless” meant you could end up sleeping on hard plastic theater seats on one end of the boat or the other. There was always the floor if my kit included a sleeping bag and a backpack I could fashion into a pillow. Sometimes I carried a pack but sometimes I didn’t.

To this day, I don’t remember how I discovered the box of life preservers. Natural curiosity I suppose. But I do remember looking into the sturdy grey-painted plywood box full of equally grey PFD’s (personal flotation devices) and having an Aha! moment. There were at least two feet of space between the cover and the lifejackets. I could fit in there. No sweat!

But I was civic-minded and afraid enough of the law to not open up and settle amongst the life preservers without “permission.” I took my idea to a kindly-looking purse nearby. I interpreted his first reaction to my request as not to fetch the law but maybe the whitecoats. Registering how young I was, he quickly softened and granted me “permission” to sleep in the life preserver box overnight.

He added – unnecessarily, I thought: “You’ll have to get out of the box right quick if da passengers need ’em.” The brogue was strong and to me, that meant he had that Newfoundlander born-in-the-bone sensibility about helping your fellow human beings. I slept the sleep of the just on the ferry crossing that night.

Other happy places were further afield in the world. In India, somewhere near New Delhi, I believe it was, a nice young Indian Sikh in a red turban took me to a temple at dusk. The setting sun was that magnificent red and orange and purple that defies description even in pictures. You can only fully appreciate it if you see it for yourself.

At a point, the Sikh raised his hands and clapped. A cacophony of budgerigars came flying out and swooping down from the rafters. They were every imaginable color that “budgies” could be. And there were thousands of them. Living outside. Free and magnificent.

They flew several thousands of meters away from the temple. They were like a light show or living rainbow that cackled in unison as budgies in captivity sometimes do. But these beautiful birds were not on a perch in a sad, little pet shop. Their beauty took me aback as did the young man’s ability to cause them to fly on command. Or so it seemed.

There was a particular stop on a Himalayan trek that has stayed deep within me. On a gorgeous morning with a postcard-clear blue sky, I stopped on my trek to put down my pack at a stone cairn to rest. When I turned around, the full majesty of Mt. Everest rose before me. Its apex was covered in snow being blown by high mountain winds. The peak was framed on either side by clusters of multi-colored flowers from the rhododendron forests it sat behind in the distance.

“Rhododendrons?” I wondered aloud. My mind clung to an image of small tidy bushes planted by the front steps that many Canadian gardeners cultivated. But these were in no way that. These were tall, towering trees heavy with blooms in red, white, and pink. My trek through the canopy of Rhodos was more special when I realized I would not likely see such magnificent trees as these anywhere else on the planet.

Other happy places I’ve been to have been smaller and more private. Snuggling beneath a down comforter or featherbed, preferably with a hot cup of tea and milk. Sitting down in the middle of a forest propped up against a stately old moss-covered tree, absorbing the cool and the woodland fragrance. Sitting in snow, carefully shielded from the cold, and breathing in the ir that froze the hairs in my nose.

Occasionally I have also found a deep level of peace and happiness in someone’s arms. This unique comfort generic to lovers is but one of a million reasons why coupling up is attractive. Just knowing there is another living, human being breathing beside you, ready to face the day with all of its potential joy and challenges is amazing.

So today I feel myself drifting off to another happy place. The ocean off Sri Lanka where schools of brightly colored aquatic fish and marine life swam before me in an endless pageant of color and shapes. Again, that vista offered the dual comforts of peace and beauty.

I never forget that I am beyond fortunate to have these happy places to revisit. I was very fortunate to have visited them in the first place.

And I am also very happy for the chance to go back into my memories whenever I want to relive them again when I want to. Like now, for example…