OAK

For five days, from Saturday to Wednesday, I was in the midwest. Now that I live in Berkeley I use the Oakland airport which is such a source of considerable sorrow to me; gone are the cosmopolitan days of hipster SFO, people from all corners of the world and walks of life meandering or in some cases bustling about, toting packages of all shapes and sizes the contents of which I can only begin to imagine. One time I even felt like the protagonist from the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day when in a mind-bending moment of almost- time travel I found a boarding pass on the ground from a flight that had departed later that same day from Sydney, Australia and already arrived in San Francisco. Ah, the powers of the International Date Line.

My favorite thing to do there is check in really early for my own flight, get a cup of Peet's with cream and brown sugar from the kiosk in Terminal 1 by the security checkpoint near the United gates, then go sit in the International Terminal. On the modular, modern benches I sip my coffee, backpack on the floor near my feet and journal in my lap, alternately watching the people and reading the boards, imagining all the planes I could possibly board that very day, considering all the places I might go:

Bangkok or Beijing?
Paris or Panama City?
Sydney or Santiago?
Tokyo or Taipei?

I have spent time sitting in a lot of airports, and I have a feeling that is not going to change anytime soon. I like that feeling :)

All those globe-trotting fantasies aside, I return to my original disappointing realization that for this most recent trip at least such cosmopolitanality (is that a word?) was not part of my journey as my flight to Dallas and on to O'Hare left from Oakland. Oakland, like Midway in Chicago, where the vast majority of flights are on Southwest and almost every plane taking off, regardless of airline, is going to either Phoenix or Kansas City. Sigh... I felt the weight of my own inner snobbish traveler weighing heavily upon me. "Can't you see?" I wanted to tell my fellow passengers at Gate 21. "I don't usually use this airport! I fly to places like Auckland and Zurich, Toronto and Tel Aviv! I have a passport and travel on flights of such great duration and to such distant places that the passengers are still served meals!"

It reminded me of something Sarah wrote to me this past summer, having arrived in Spain after almost three weeks in Israel and then the same amount of time in Tanzania, having done everything from prayed at the Kotel to climbed Kilimanjaro and maybe even dined in a foreign sidewalk cafe or two somewhere along the way for good measure. Having spent time in far-flung airports with unfamiliar three-letter codes like MAD (Madrid) and ADD (Addis Ababa), she was sending email from the luxury of the beach town of Sitges where she drank beer on the beach with topless women while listening to her hostess tell stories of just-completed summer travel through places slightly more tame than the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa.

"...laura told me about her trip to eastern europe tonight with (someone relatively prominent in the Jewish community) and i listened, feeling somehow, in a weird sort of way like the experienced traveler in the room. i have become very accustomed to being on the road in a wonderful sort of way. this trip has reminded me just how much i love to travel: to see new places, get lost in new streets, and meet the people behind a place or the pages of their book..."

I find that I often think like this, I am at times elitist in my journeys, I roll my eyes at the person in line in front of me checking in for a flight or getting on an airplane, the person who does not know how to use the self check-in machine or who tries to show their driver's license to the gate agent prior to going down the jetway. Oh, such novices, I think to myself.

Then I remember the first time I flew alone from Chicago to Detroit to Boston and was so scared that I had to pay $12 a minute to use the AirPhone in the back of the seat in front of me to call my best friend...the time I was detained at customs in Montreal because the metronome in my carry-on was mistaken for a bomb...the first time I traveled terrifyingly alone, without Rebecca, to Israel when jetlagged and overwhelmed I mistakenly tried to get in a sherut (shared ride van) going to the completely wrong part of the country (Beersheva in the Negev) and was assertively redirected into an individual taxi going to my actual destination (Jerusalem) by the 90-year-old grande dame Israeli woman who had been seated next to me on my flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv.

I need to take a more active approach to adjusting my travel attitude. Eveyone's got to start somewhere, and for some people that is at the Southwest ticket counter in Oakland.