Back Home...

It's always so good to come home... I arrived early yesterday evening, and had a lazy, comfy few hours before going to sleep – and then we didn't get up until after dawn (very late for us), when our three field spaniels decided we'd been in bed entirely too long. They're very efficient at waking us up – they just walk all over us, jumping occasionally; that's all it takes...

Coming home last night, the best part (as always) was the greetings from my honey, my dogs, and Maka Lea (our little challenged kitty).

While I was away, poor Debbie was suffering through two challenges of her own. I really hated being away while this was going on...

The first one was her recovering broken arm. The cast came off two weeks ago, but she's been in awful pain ever since. This week she finally reached the point where she couldn't stand it any more and started making insistent calls both to the doctor caring for her arm and to our GP. In the end, they diagnosed her as having reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RDS) – basically some nerve damage, most likely caused either by the injury itself, the setting of the bones, or possibly by the initial cast being too tight. The good news is that both the pain and the underlying cause of the pain are eminently treatable. She's now taking neurontin (aka gabapentin), which I picked up on the way back from the airport last night. This drug, originally used as an anti-epileptic, has recently been found to be useful for people suffering from RDS. The prognosis is that in about three weeks she'll start seeing improvement (and the pain should disappear immediately). Fingers crossed on this one...

The second challenge involved Aka, our oldest cat. We've had Aka a long, long time – our best guess is that we adopted him in 1988, 21 years ago. He was a feral kitty in our (then) Chula Vista neighborhood, about six months old, when Debbie captured and tamed him. He's always been aggressive (typical of a feral cat), so he's always lived in our outdoor cattery. For the last years his companion has been Koa, our psychotic kitty. Somehow the two of them became best buddies, inseperable. Aka's been going downhill for months, losing weight and slowly but inexorably getting weaker and weaker. At this point in our lives we've lived through the loss of many of our furry companions, and we've become quite sensitized to the challenges of deciding exactly when the time has come to say goodbye to one of them. Our hearts always tell us to do more and more to try to restore them to health, but our heads tell us that sometimes that's for our benefit and not our friend's. On Wednesday this week, Debbie was very worried about Aka's condition, and took him down to Dr. Christine Wilson, our wonderful vet in Jamul. The folks there got some fluids into him, but couldn't get him to eat (this is quite typical for old or sick cats – they just stop eating). Blood tests brought bad news – Aka was suffering from massive systemic, most likely from a metastasizing cancer or some equally disastrous organ failure. He wasn't suffering, just fading away. Usually Debbie and I face these decisions together, but this time I wasn't home and Debbie made the call on her own (but it's certainly one I agreed with). One of our friends and neighbors (Paula C.) went down to Dr. Wilson's with her, and Debbie held Aka as slipped away...

On a completely different note, each of my three flights on this trip had an interesting component.

On my first flight (San Diego to Newark), I sat next to a fellow who's family (wife and four kids) was scattered around us, all in middle seats (they were on standby, and so got the worst seats). They were all from Tijuana, Mexico (a large city just across the border from San Diego), en route to Madrid, Spain where he had just gotten a new (and good) job. I had an interesting conversation with him during the trip, but the best part happened just before we landed in Newark. During our final approach, we had an excellent view of New York City and the Hudson Bay area. Two of his sons were in the rows immediately behind us, and we heard them shouting “estatua de la libertad!” – Statue of Liberty. In fact, we had a great view of Lady Liberty. Isn't it interesting that some young (around 8 or 9 years old) Mexican kids recognized it immediately, and were excited to see it? I can't help but wonder how many American kids of the same age would react like that...

My second flight (Newark to Houston) started off about as unexciting as it could – we just sat on the tarmac for almost two hours waiting to take off. Storms were causing traffic delays throughout the east coast, and planes were stacking up at all the major airports, Newark included. Finally we took off, and the pilots managed to make up all but 45 minutes of the delay. The flight to Houston was bumpy, but not exceptionally slow. The landing was something else altogether! We came in steep and fast, and slammed into the ground more forcefully than any other landing I can remember. From my seat I could see the wingtips, and it looked like they bent to within a foot or two of the ground as we hit, then oscillated five or six times before they started looking solid again. Nearly all of the overhead luggage bins sprang open, and quite a bit of luggage spilled out. The plane was a Boeing 767, and the arrangement of the luggage bins was such that most of the luggage spilled into the aisles. So far as I know, nobody was hurt by the hundreds of pieces of luggage that fell out. I ended up with a small suitcase in my lap – it sort of rolled onto me after falling down onto a big suitcase that had already fallen into the aisle. My laptop was in its case in the overhead, and it fell out but was caught by the shoulder strap tangling with the hinge – so no damage was done to my stuff. I'm pretty sure not everybody with a laptop was so lucky. There were some shouts and screams at the moment the luggage fell out, but no panic – and once we figured out that nobody had been hurt, there was much relieved laughter. Everybody helped scoop the luggage back up when the pilot paused on the taxiway and asked us to clear the aisles. By the time we got to the gate, the mood was downright jovial...

On my final flight (Houston to San Diego), the young lady sitting next to me was the most interesting element. She was about my height, extremely thin, with the kind of breathtakingly beautiful face that just stops you in your tracks. She was also one of the blackest people I have ever seen, ebony in the truest sense. The poor girl was terrified – after a while I was able to figure out that this was her first trip by air. She's from Ethiopia, and en route to San Diego to go to school at USD, where she had a full scholarship. She spoke only a kind of broken, pidgin English, but it was fascinating to hear her speak her native language (Amharic) on the cell phone; it sounded quite beautiful to my ears, melodic and lilting. We conversed (or tried to) for the entire trip – she was full of questions about San Diego and the environs, which I tried to answer as best I could. Some of her questions I had no clue about – such as whether there were any Ethiopian groceries or restaurants. Others I could help a bit more on, such as where were good communities to live, what kind of transportation was available, etc. She had absolutely no idea about any of these things, she was simply traveling into something completely unknown to her. If I understood her correctly, her scholarship was related somehow to a modeling contest, something she had won first in Ethiopia, then in Johannesburg, South Africa. The prize was a four year full scholarship (including living expenses) at her choice of four universities: USD, one in England, one in France, and one in South Africa. She said it has always been her dream to one day see America, so given this opportunity to actually live in America for four years, she snatched it instantly. She was the first person in her family (from some remote place in Ethiopia) to ever leave Ethiopia, when she traveled to Johannesburg. Her entire community is all excited about her opportunity in America, and her cell phone calls at every stop along the way were to various relatives and friends back home. She doesn't know anybody in San Diego, but did manage to find a church in San Diego that had some kind of a connection (I never did understand what she was telling me about that) to her church back home, so she's got some people to lean on for help. She's staying with a pastor and his wife for the first few weeks after she arrives, but she's got to find a place to live fairly quickly. Her reaction to all this seemed to be a mixture of excitement and terror, which is easy enough to understand. What a grand adventure, to be sure – but also what a wrenching and uncomfortable thing it must be to be torn from your community and sent halfway around the world to live with total strangers. I came away with a feeling that this very sensible young lady would do just fine. I also had the pleasure of hearing her say something very nice to hear: that she has been overwhelmed by how friendly and helpful the American strangers she's run into have been. She said that Ethiopians could learn a lot about human kindness from Americans...