Flying the Friendly But Heartless Skies

So much for flying on a Tuesday with the logic that midweek there can’t possibly be the crowds and delays of weekends. This morning’s motions through Newark airport for my flight to Chicago and the Kale Soup crew reading at UI’s Carr Series recalled a cloud suspended on an absolutely windless day: 100 people in a single file security line, unmoving; security personnel, unmoved—until I blew a little breeze their way and clamored that I was about to miss my flight. Miraculously they moved me ahead on the conveyer belt, the loop of post 9/11 airport cinema: Take off shoes, belt, coat, empty pockets, check your dignity with your 3 inches-too-much-size-of-a-tumor oversized bag.

But who am I on a throwaway Tuesday to harp on dignity? For most Tuesdays, and all the other days this last year, dignity had little to do with cloudless urgency. My mother spent most of her time in a sick bed while the sky went on, “buffeting clouds together,” as Virginia Woolf writes in On Being Ill, “drawing vast trains of ships and wagons” and planes “from North to South” and East to West…”

My mother barely cared, in our presence, to look at her windows, first in her bed at home, where she was still ambulatory. Then immobile in an acute care facility cot. But she knew, though strangely gave hints in her way, not to us her family, but friends and nurses, that outside the “interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows…veiling the sun and unveiling…this endless activity” would continue to “work its will year in year out” without her. Without any of us. Because this sky that shelters us while “divinely beautiful…is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources [including the airlines] are used for some purpose that has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.”

My last year with her was a cloud on a windless day.