Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles

Greetings from Abilene, Texas located here near the edge of the sun this July 21, 2006.

The highs this week temperature wise have been in the 100s with exactly 100 degrees Farenheit expected again today. Drought persists across Texas and was notable from the air flying into Dallas and Abilene both yesterday.

Not even most yards in the sprawling, vast subdivisions surrounding Dallas and Fort Worth were green. In much of Texas, water is scarce so the watering of lawns takes a back seat to other water needs. The landscape as a whole had a very barren look to it from the air. It was a mosiac in browns, everything looking dry and dusty.

It looks even worse from here on the ground. The once fairly lush vegetation around houses in oasis like settings now wilts and dies in the heat of the sun. The shrubs around my mom’s house here look well on their way to extinction, including my favorite rose bush outside my bedroom window. I’ve long claimed it as my bedroom, even though I didn’t grow up here, nor have I ever lived here.

But it is the one I have slept in since my dad left this earth from that room nearly 10 years ago. His departure was peaceful and calm and as he’d requested of the Lord. He’d asked me late on Sunday night before his death in the early hours of Tuesday morning to pray for him that “the Lord come quickly.” I did so with he and my mom and the Lord blessed us all in his leaving swiftly and painlessly in his sleep.

I have since prayed I leave this earth by the same path. Secure in faith, confidently waiting for that final call home, surrounded by the loves of my life in my family whole, some near by, some further away, some waiting at the gates of heaven.

But, here on my second annual visit to Abilene in the middle of July (you’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?) I find myself once again susceptible to the exploitation of my weaknesses and must confess (as I did last July) my sister has already talked me (I would say coerced, but it didn’t take much talking) into an excursion to Starbucks, my nemesis (it’s such a big one I had to post twice about it here and here), later this afternoon to have a “venti” iced coffee. (That’s a very large one. Okay – THE largest, for those of you uninitiated in the vageries of exorbitantly expensive coffee which I stedfastly refuse to partake of under “normal” circumstances, but hey – I’m here on the edge of the sun.)

Otherwise, I haven’t been out today, nor do I plan to go out. It’s blasted hot out there!

Yesterday was a very long day, so I’ve been resting up today for what I’m sure will be lots of adventures here in Cow Town. My day yesterday began at precisely 3:11 a.m. when I first awoke from a dream. I tossed and turned for a while contemplating all of the last minute things I’d left undone or unpacked due to our temporary circumstances and boxed up lives that require an inordinate amount of thinking and ripping open of boxes to sustain and finally got up about 4:30 a.m. determining sleep was no longer an option.

Tom warned me I would be wiped out later in the day and he was right, but as I told him, what was I going to do. Sleep had left me, not to be found again until later in odd moments throughout the day.

He took me on to the airport in New Orleans when he got up at the still absurdly early hour of 6:30 a. m. (for a lifelong morning person, these health problems the past few years have totally done me in and I cannot function until about noon anymore), which was several hours before my 11 a.m. flight, but he needed to get on to work. We’d planned to be there for 9:30 a.m. so I could fight the crowds, get checked in and have wheeled assistance to the hinterlands of concourse C, where my plane was going to be.

Surprise number one for the day (which it really shouldn’t have been, but somehow was) was that traffic into New Orleans from across the east end of Lake Pontchartrain and Slidell wasn’t really very heavy. It was for months after the storm when elevated Interstate 10 was heavily damaged the entire six mile stretch and re-routed across the middle of the lake – a 25 mile span. And it still is for many hours of the week and weekends while they continue to shore up the road, but yesterday morning it was relatively light.

Of course, I didn’t experience any of that because I was snoozing most of the way trying to get caught up with my 5 or 6 hours of missing sleep.

Surprise number two came when we arrived at the airport about 8 a.m. It was our first excursion there since Katrina and no one’s left in town to fly, people. There were maybe three or four cars total in front of the terminal, very few people inside anywhere, not many concessions open and not many flights in and out.

Even with wheel chair assistance and getting through security and all I arrived at the gate about 8:15 a.m. and had to wait till boarding began about 10:30 a.m. The plane was completely full with the man waiting next to me saying he was on stand by to hopefully get to Dallas before the next flight that wasn’t until much later in the day. He made it. I spent most of the hour’s flying time napping once more.

I had a scheduled three hour layover in Dallas because the number of flights between Dallas and Abilene has greatly diminshed (as apparently they have all across the country, based on the flight schedules I saw due in part, I’m sure, to higher fuel costs) and we arrived there 15 minutes early on yesterday of all days.

For me it just meant more time to hang out in what are terribly uncomfortable and expensive airports to begin with. But I did get an extra-long tour on the tram from one end of concourse C, across the connecting passage to the furtherest end of concourse A, helping to pass off traveling children along the way. It was rather adventurous, too.

It was like being in the middle of a video game where you try to pick off as many unsuspecting obstacles in your path as you can to earn points. In our case, it was travelers with lots of luggage and loose kids who were also lost in thought as they trekked past gates and TV screens looking for their next flights out.

I finally arrived at my connecting gate down at the very end of the concourse and then had to hike back toward civilization to find some restrooms and places to eat. I ended up in a food court (all the nicer places had long lines) where McDonald’s was the best of the lot to choose from and ordered a salad that was actually pretty good.

I sat there reading this week’s Newsweek, that I’d started on in New Orleans, and whiled away as much time as I could as I contemplated the ramifications of world war three or ten, depending upon how you view the history of the world and what “religious” group (cult? persuasion?) you’re part of, being thrust upon us all at any moment by way of the middle east or, less likely (I suppose), North Korea. Just light reading on my part, you see, for a weary traveler. In “real” life I don’t allow myself to dwell on matters out of my control, except through prayer, of course. But somehow the depressing reading seemed to fit with the CNN headline news on the TV screens I passed all throughout the airport and the long tiring day.

No naps were managed in Dallas despite the long wait, musical chair changes of gates along the concourse accomodating my Abilene flight and several delays in departure. My total Dallas time was four hours and I spent it all wide awake.

Another nap commenced with departure from Dallas even though the Saab prop job was noisy and the ride like a roller coaster. It was a very bumpy take off, even more bumpy landing, but I did arrive in one piece (which is more than we’d thought for a while going into Dallas from New Orleans when the pilot apparently missed his turn to the airport and instead of slowing banking the jet to our left to D/FW, swiftly hung a 45 degree left turn and dropped us unceremoniously on the runway).

I was the last person deplaning in Abilene because of my continued need for a wheel chair due to my limited walking restrictions. There was a very elderly lady in front of me who also needed a wheel chair (I couldn’t push my way past her, now, could I? I mean – come on) and while the airport had two chairs on hand, they had only one young girl to push them, so I had a long wait.

The stewardess volunteered, but she couldn’t (regulations) do it. She was in a hurry to get the plane ready to fly back to Dallas so they could make a jaunt over to Monroe, Lousiana, that hot spot of activity on I-20 in north Louisiana (about like that hot spot of activity on I-20 here in Abilene).

My mom and sister had about given up on me showing up when I finally appeared. We got in lots of visiting there, though, while waiting (for some unknown reason) at least 30 minutes for the luggage to hit the conveyer belt. I have no idea what the delay was. I mean, ours was the only plane out there so it wasn’t like they had to figure out where the luggage was going or who it all belonged to. I was beginning to wonder if they’d even brought any luggage from Dallas after all the gate changes and flight delays I’d sat through there.

I got “home” to my mom’s about 6:15 p.m. thoroughly wiped out, as Tom had predicted, but supremely happy to be here after the endlessly grueling 11 months since I’d fled here during Katrina. While I began unpacking, my mom broke her normal routine of having the bigger meal of the day at noon with snacking in the evenings to prepare us what I considered to be the perfect dinner.

She made my favorite wilted lettuce salad with Romaine, chopped boiled eggs, bacon, green onion and hot vinegar, sugar(sweetener for us) and water dressing that she heated in the bacon drippings and poured over the salad as we sat down to eat. She made a huge bowl of the salad and we ate every bite.

I slept well and we had a great visit in the middle of the day today with my daughter, Rebecca, who came down to pick up Keegan from over at ACU’s Impulse camp this week. I’d not seen them since last summer, so that was a treat. Then my son David called a while ago to “visit” and to (mainly) “check in” he said to see what me and Grandma were doing. He didn’t want to miss any of the action.

Well – now here it is nearly 7 p.m. and my ever lovin’ sister has not yet showed up to whisk me away to Starbucks for that iced venti, so maybe I’ve escaped temptation’s pull for one more day. And maybe the heat wave will break and we’ll only be having temperatures in the 90s next week. And maybe it will rain to soak in the parched earth. Maybe.

Or maybe I’ll just rest and relax and catch up on all the latest family goings on while I sip on my iced coffees every afternoon from Starbucks that my sister has looked forward to me having with her for the past 11 months. And we’ll eat mom’s great cooking and laugh for hours on end about our growing up years and reminisce about all of the people and places we’ve known along the way.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll think and talk about dad and our little brother who left us so long ago when he was 8 and we’ll look forward to the time when we’re together on the eternal day to come. When we won’t grow weary and tired because we can’t sleep and the troubles of the world are many.

You know. One day when you and me and we all get to go home together.

Till then, I’m enjoying my time here on the edge of the sun in the middle of July, 2006, out here in Abilene, Texas.