Thoughts at 30,000 ft

(Written Saturday, September 6th.)

There's something about a nighttime plane ride that gets into your head. The world looks different through a porthole; I can't tell whether my thoughts are constrained or focused. Is the cabin slightly over-pressure, keeping my thoughts too close together and irritated, or is it slightly under-pressure, letting them roam more freely? They race back and forth from mellow and contented to choppy and disconnected - mind turbulence.

I'm on a flight to Maine to bury my grandmother.

Northern Maine is a good place for a funeral. It is rugged and careworn. It seems slightly abandoned. Another Scotland - the Outer Hebrides - it appears to live out of pure stubbornness or maybe spite. Or perhaps it's that it realizes it has very few options and the ones it has are pretty stark; it is an old lady in a nursing home. Summer is wrapping up quickly there. Summers in Northern Maine are a furtive and futile recovery, like an addict's pointless plunge into sobriety before the next return of delirious normalcy. Why bother?

I've left Stacy and the kids behind and I miss them tremendously. I think about everything that has gone into getting to the point I'm at now. Not in the immediate sense of the flurry of coordination calls and bite of last minute plane tickets, but in the sense closest to the eternal that we have a frame of reference for - as "long term" as 40 years will buy you. It wouldn't be wise to think about my grandmother now. I think of Stacy and the kids and miss them some more.

It seems that everything has been leading up to this point, almost inevitably. I can't imagine things being significantly different, and memory almost fails me for a time when Stacy and I didn't have two kids, or we weren't married. I can't imagine being alone. Everyone tells me this is the sweet spot and the best time of my life. I'm afraid I believe them. Every phase of life has been a trade up from the one before. Through high school, everyone's pressure relief from the universal horrors of middle school, and college, yet another metamorphosis, I've been carried on a predestined path. As I got to each crossroad in Frost's yellow wood I never had time to consider which was the less travelled; it seemed I was drawn down or the other without much personal volition. But it still has made all the difference. And I wonder: am I now at the peak? It seems to be the pinnacle. I don't see where it can go from here, or rather, the options appear few and stark. Stacy and the kids: Indian summer, a sweet time of beauty and contentment before things get tough again.

We're beginning our initial descent into the Portland area.