Over this recent long weekend honoring the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I was in Chicago visiting my family. This morning, in my attempt to return to Berkeley, I missed my flight at O'Hare and was reminded of why the urban hipster snob in me, while learning to love the chill East Bay life of Berkeley, unabashedly hates the Oakland airport.
How many non-stop flights are there from O'Hare to SFO every day?
Ten.
How many are there to Oakland?
Three.
How many had already departed by the time I checked in seventeen minutes after the cutoff for my original flight?
Two.
How many hours did I get to wait for the third and final flight of the day?
Eight.
*sigh*
I refused, however, to sit on the nasty C-concourse carpet all day long and instead bravely bundled myself up (high temperature=six degrees outside today in Chicago, SIX! insanity...) and got on the CTA Blue Line heading downtown. By noon I was not only not at 38,000 feet on my way back to California, I was not even in my early thirties anymore. Instead I found myself half my life ago back in time as I stood before this painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, by Impressionist Georges Seurat.
Remember the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, only the coolest flick of my entire adolescent life? I must have seen it dozens of times and had, in that nerdy teenage way, much of the dialogue memorized. Who did I want to be more, Ferris or Sloane? I could never decide. The scenes at the Art Institute of Chicago were always my favorite and I dreamed of the day someone would hold my hand and kiss me in front of the Chagall windows. Once I became a teacher and started leading my own students on learning journeys out into the world I became even more fond of the scene with Cameron, Sloane, and Ferris holding hands in a long line of kids on a field trip as they paraded in front of the famous Seurat. So today, with eight hours to kill, I stood before the wall-sized masterpiece myself and pretended I had Sloane's moussed and Aqua-Netted hair, Ferris' leather jacket, and Cameron's dad's red convertible. That, as Quincy from the Little Einstein videos has taught my sister-in-teeth Kelli to say, would be a-MAZE-ing!
I have quite a powerful imagination, and the time warp of my daydream almost made up for the six-degree weather. Almost...
1 comment:
You must come to NYC and see the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George. The picture comes alive. For someone with a vivid imagination you may already have pictured this in your mind's eye. We saw the London production--it was wonderful. Welcome back to the USA!
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