Into the future...

...cruising at altitude

If you haven’t traveled for a while,

that is,

If you haven’t gotten on an airplane,

And eaten the Thai curry chicken on a plastic plate,

And the warm chocolate cookie, and the pizza twist,

And flown over an ocean and gained six hours,

Although everyone seems to fly with their window shades down now,

So that you could have been in a time cocoon,

Unlike those old KLM prop-jet days when you landed in Shannon first,

No window shades,

And you could see the watery waves below,

Well then, you don’t know where to begin,

Or where to end,

Except maybe to mention the talkative seat mate

(I thought those days were over)

who wanted, at 30,000 feet,

To fix everything wrong with everything these days,

in-between the warm chocolate cookie and the pizza twist,

And we did try.

The time mélange that is a memoir comes to mind —

all those miles, all those waves, all those continents, all those ideas —

All I know for sure is that it’s 3:24 a.m. where the grandbabies,

no longer building alphabet-block towers,

were, a few days ago, throwing graduation caps into the air and delivering keynote addresses,

and offering the best hope for the future that my seat mate could possibly imagine.