Extra-virgin

The first time I ever flew alone was on the day before Thanksgiving, 1983. I was 17 and headed home from college for the first time since I had been dropped off there by my parents in front of Carmichael Hall, my freshman dorm at Tufts University, on a well-manicured suburban campus that lay 20 minutes outside of Boston. Prior to that, I had never flown anywhere except with my parents.

These were the days before the advent of the Shuttle between Boston and New York, before computers and then e-tickets sped up the check-in process. Instead, there was the now-defunct Peoples’ Express, the pre-cursor in spirit (if not in actual execution) to the no-frills logic of JetBlue. As was often the case at high-volume travel times in those days, my first solo journey began with an hours-long wait on the check-in line behind hundreds and hundreds of other travelers. Standing in a seemingly endless line of would-be holiday travelers, slowly making my way round and round and round a labyrinth of ropes at the center of the frills-free warehouse-sized terminal, I felt a profound sense of helplessness fueled by a low-grade fear of flying and a high-grade adolescent tendency to dramatize. What if after all this waiting and trudging and trudging and waiting, all that awaited me was an economy seat on an overstuffed airplane destined to fall from the sky?

Having maintained a journal where I confessed my innermost thoughts since I the age of eight, it came as no surprise that as I awaited to make my first “solo flight”, I found myself overwhelmed by an impulse to write. But for reasons that now completely elude me, I was averse to the idea of hauling out my journal in front of a plane full of strangers. As such, when I finally made it out of the check-in line and trekked over to the departure gate, I made a bee-line to the nearest newstand, where I purchased a blank greeting card and a ballpoint pen. My plan was to write a long letter to "someone". No one would have to know the "someone" was just me.

Once on the plane, I took out my greeting card and proceeded to write my pretend letter. I wrote in a teeny-tiny scrawl, both because I didn’t want to run out of space before we landed and also because I didn’t want anyone to be able to read over my shoulder. I remember I started off with some sort of overwrought description of the sound of wind rushing against the airplane’s metal. But then I quickly shifted to writing about the then-love-of-my-life, a boy named Tim who was only marginally interested in me. When a relationship is out-of-balance, there is always lots to say. And so I wrote from the moment I sat down until the moment it was time to pack up and de-plane.

Throughout my four years of college, I continued the tradition of writing on greeting cards during my flights to and from Boston. Once I was in law school, greeting cards gave way to legal pads on airplane flights, and the tradition of writing "letters" to myself on long yellow lined paper, as a means to corraling my scattered thoughts, continued for more than a decade. In the dawn of the legal-pad days, my furtive scrawling would be accompanied by a one-ounce packet of Smokehouse Almonds, which the “stewardess” would hand me along with my Diet Sprite. Somewhere down the line, that generous portion of salty, hickory-smoked almonds gave way to a more petite packet of bland cocktail peanuts. Over the course of many years, many more flights and many airline bankruptcies, the petite packet of peanuts gave way to even more petite packets until finally, today we have a half ounce packet of unidentifiable ricey, crunchy things that the “flight attendant” handed me en route from New York to Denver Friday night, along with the tiny bottle of cold, screw-top-cap Cab that I purchased for eight dollars.

Nowadays, we check in at airports by swiping a credit card in a machine marked “e-Tickets", receiving a computer-generated boarding pass, without ever having to speak to another human being. And the impossibly long and winding line is not for check-in, but for airport security, where I was taken to task prior to my Westbound flight for packing in my carry-on wheelie-bag a small bottle of hair conditioner and a tube of toothpaste. Prior to this return-flight to New York, I was issued an actual "warning" by a disdainful security officer for packing in my handbag a one-ounce bottle of moisturizer. "You should have disclosed this without our having to find it ourselves," he frowned, "Don't you watch the news?"

And of course, nowadays there is the ubiquitous laptop. It's a nice touch - I can type as fast as I think, whereas I could never scrawl quickly enough to catch all of my thoughts on paper as the airplane sped through the air. Of course, if the smirking security officers had not permitted me to carry my laptop on the plane, I suppose I would have run off to the nearest Hudson News and purchased yet another greeting card. And I must admit that there is a part of me that longs for the days where there I couldn't edit myself as I wrote (backspace, backspace, delete, delete). And even more than that, I’m finding myself wistfully longing for the accountability of those greeting cards.

In my parents’ house, there has long been a banker's cardboard box containing more than a dozen journals, the journals that I’d kept over the years until I no longer lived under their roof. Stuck inside many of those journals, like brightly colored bookmarks, are my greeting cards. And like bookmarks, they invite me to return to them if I should want to. And upon doing so, they would read like plaintive missives from a young friend, pouring her soul out to someone who is older and hopefully wiser.

Sadly, the laptop doesn’t create that relationship between me and my young friend, my former self. For the most part, I never do get around to re-reading anything I write. And when my laptop crashed at the end of the summer, I lost everything I had ever written on it. Oddly this did not bother me in the slightest: I felt no connection to the ramblings on my laptop, which feel less significant both because I am able to edit myself as I write and because with the laptop there is no need for "economy". I can write and write and write and write without my fingers growing cramped, and I don’t have to organize my thoughts because I can just keep on writing until I get all of my thoughts out onto the screen. What might have been a two page, highly condensed and likewise intense entry in my journal, or on one of my greeting cards, would now be a five or six page single-spaced, 10-point-font ramble. Somewhere in all of the ramble would be the essence of what was in my heart and mind as I wrote it. But it would require a long and patient re-read to get to that essence.

It’s as if my hand-written expressions were pure, undistilled, extra-virgin expressions, whereas the stuff I write on my laptop is more like Velveeta - processed and soft. Or perhaps my laptop journaling is the writing equivalent of Tasti-D-Lite, whose taste and texture is so watered down that I have to eat huge quantities of it just to get the sense that I have eaten anything at all.

I miss the visceral rawness of my former handwritten missives. And yet, here I sit, crammed into my seat on my flight back to New York from Denver, typing away on my laptop as I nibble on a tiny portion of ricey crunchy things. Ever the optimist, I suppose that I harbor a glimmer of hope that one of these days, I will type something here that I feel is as worth a revisit as a handwritten letter from a 17-year old college freshman to a middle-aged woman who knows, maybe, a little something about something.

YC