Hamburg, 24.05.2025: Missed Flights and Würst with Potato Salad

We arrived in Hamburg on the 24th totally worn out after a nightmare in the Atlanta airport. Our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam on the 23rd took off five hours late, causing us to miss our connecting flight to Hamburg. I wrote about this debacle on Facebook:

En Route to Edinburgh 24.6.09: Stars in Liberty's Crown, Kicks in the Kidneys

In the plane in NY, waiting to take off for Edinburgh. Our trip began early today in Little Rock, then to Atlanta and NY, and now overseas.

When we got onto the plane in Little Rock, they announced the air conditioning was not working. And oh by the way, we’ll be delayed due to a malfunction of our computer system that requires us to do all the paperwork by hand.

Then, as we take off: and oh by the way, the bathroom is broken. Inauspicious omens for the start of a trip!

In Atlanta, we prepare to get into the queue for take-off, and an announcement comes. Please keep your seats, ladies and gents. We can’t go further as long as you’re not seated.

Atlanta, Georgia: 25.5.1994: Rice Connections, Family Connections

A good day, a pleasant one. We researched again today, all day, at the Georgia Archives, and I found a lot of treasures, family documents . . . .

After working all day, we went to an Indian restaurant on Peachtree—Raja something or other. We had a vegetable plate of appetizers, papadums, lamb, banana, and coconut curry, a biryani of chicken, rice and peanuts (! yes, not almonds), paratha, and beer. Scrumptious. The biryani makes me think of all the cuisines that flavor rice with some sauce, and serve it with bits of meat and lots of vegetables. One gets a flavorful, filling, and balanced meal that way, and it’s not expensive. E.g., arroz con pollo, which is cooked by a technique similar to that of biryani, and pilaf, which must be the Persian antecedent of biryani, and which becomes purloo in the South, where the Indian dish marries with the Spanish and becomes Spanish rice.

(Not so strange, really, if one thinks of the Arabian roots of Spanish rice cuisine.) But the tomato’s, of course, New World. And surely jambalaya is a south Louisiana version of arroz con pollo or paella (and what’s the connection between those two?)—despite all those fanciful south Louisiana legends of Indian (i.e., native American) origin. And then all the Chinese rice dishes like fried rice, congee, the hot pot, etc.

Atlanta, Georgia 23.5.1994: Family Ghosts and Faded Tombstones

Walnut Fork church near Braselton, Georgia: I did a rubbing of Jacob Braselton, Sr.’s, tombstone. Could not get one of Jacob, Jr., and wife Mary Bryson. Their stones are flat, the faux-crypt style, and badly worn—even more so than a few years ago when I was here. Mary’s appears not to have an inscription, as her will stipulates: she asks to be brought back to Walnut Fork church (she was then living in Lumpkin County) and buried beside her husband, with a monument similar to his, but no inscription. The plot of Jacob, Mary, and their infant granddaughter Margaret has a marker saying it was restored by Leita Green Braselton and her sister Nell.

Today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death in 1968, which was Ascension Thursday that year. Requiescat in pace.

Last night, dinner at a restaurant on Peachtree called Grand China. It was a charmed experience. The owner, a Mrs. Tse-Chih Chang, brought us to our table and stood talking for half an hour—about ghosts in her house (one is a monk), about how her grandfather became sick and needed blood, so her grandmother went into the kitchen and chopped off her finger and fed him three cups of her blood, and so forth.*

Then she ordered for us—chicken in black bean sauce, ginger shrimps, and sizzling rice soup. It was a real treat for Pentecost day.

I awoke today on this first vacation day thinking how important it is to tell my story, to write. If I’m to have any peace with the familial ghosts that entrance me, I must meet them daily in fantasy, and write about the encounter, no matter where it leads me—even to the “dread essence beyond logic,” as Nikos Kazantzakis calls that spiritual stream that rushes underneath our lives.

*And am I crazy, or has Amy Tan not written stories very much like these? Are they stories that run through a number of Chinese-American families, then?

Frankfurt 5.8.1998: Homeward Bound, Bound by Home

Sitting in Frankfurt airport waiting for the flight to Atlanta, which is not to board for another two hours. Thinking of how I hate endings, have most problems with them in anything I wrote. And yet I seem fatally attracted to them, too, or at least to the closure they represent. That restlessness at the core of my being, waiting and seeking for what?

Traveling to Europe this time felt like some kind of end—an end in a beginning. And now here the trip is over, and I’m asking end questions again, with no sense of where they’re going. Of where I’m going . . . .

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Just taking off, an hour late, to discover my pen has leaked everywhere. Hands patched with black, as is this paper.

The people behind me—man, woman—have been giggling like teenagers since before the flight began. I’m disposed not to like them because she kicked my seat with unnecessary aggressiveness several times before we were in the air. And the sexual tension between them is so undisguised, so adolescent. Graceless . . . .

He’s a native of the Florida panhandle, a career soldier and “brat,” whose “dad” was an officer. (I know more about them than I’d choose to know.) He persistently uses a “have went” construction. He’s proud to be an Amurkun, and laid it on thick when the flight attendant told him he could be nothing else with that accent.

She’s a German citizen, but speaks a flawless colloquial anywhere-cool Americanese. She’s going to “the States” because of an 85-year old somebody (grandmother?) who needs assistance.

He speaks, and she brays falsely at what he says. She speaks, and he laughs suavely at her jokes. From what I overheard, I’d imagined they were in their 30s at best. But I’ve just gotten up to go to the bathroom, and am shocked to see they’re 50 or so.

And so it goes. Homeward bound. And bound by home.

Canterbury, 29.4.06: Pilgrimage and the Whole Grab-Bag Selft

Calling a trip a pilgrimage has this advantage: it frees one to let happen what will happen. I like that sense of freedom, of not having to decide from day to day what I should see and do.

Ironically, if one considers a pilgrimage a response to God’s guiding hand, it’s freedom one is giving up. One remains open, supple, disponible, responsive to a will transcending one’s own.

I’m not sure if—for a long time!—I’ve believed in that kind of puppet-master God pulling all the strings. Such a God is always male, and always a tyrant.

The only variation in these puppet-master theologies is whether they tyrant is benign or, well, tyrannical . . . .

Yet I’m loath to give up the idea that God guides us. Amazing things happen, “coincidences.” Doors open. Injustice is reversed. Flowers spring forth in the unlikeliest places.

I picture the God accomplishing this (with us) as a more feminine force, weaving the woof on the warp of our freedom. And with leading strings of love . . . .

Surrounded as I write this in Atlanta airport by a bevy of soldiers, all in camouflage. Where are they going? ON the flight from Little Rock, a soldier in regular clothes told Steve he’s headed to Puerto Rico “to help our boys down there.”

Why? Is something we don’t know going on “down there”? Is Bush’s response to his plummeting poll numbers going to be to beef up military presence in Latin America—in other words, while mouthing support for illegal immigrants, cynically to exploit our fear of contamination at the borders (Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is so enlightening on that point).

Things—our culture—seem more militarized than I ever recall. And yet we’re not at war—not in the engrossing sense of World War II, in which the whole nation was involved.

The military presence is especially pronounced in every airport we go to. Again, entry points, orifices: a symbolic gesture to remind us to remain on guard, to remember that we now need Big Papa (God’s emissary) to guard and protect us.

The flight here: horrendous. Steve said he can’t remember being on one so bad in a long time. I don’t think I can ever recall such a flight. It made turbulence and rough air sound like warm milk beside a hot toddy.

Things feel apocalyptic now. People look . . . odd—either messengers sent to pass on a cryptic warning, or menacing watchers.

Of course, I realize this has much to do with my mental state. If so, what does that state (and what it opens me to) portend for pilgrimage?

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Somewhere in the Atlantic approaching England. I’ve slept little and fitfully, but what sleep I got was at least moderately refreshing.

Why pilgrimage now? Why me? At one level, the answer is obvious. I just am not who I was a few years ago.

Which is to say, not sure who I am . . . . Aging, moving to death, yes.

I’ve been through a wreck. I lived. I’m not quite the same, though.

I’ve had lesions detected in my lungs. They’re apparently benign. But. They’re there, and what do they mean? Intimations of mortality?

Above all, we’re facing a move I absolutely don’t want to make. And yet everything tells me I should do so.

If nothing else, “my” life is hardly in my control. And I need guidance, strength, clarity.

Pilgrimage has to be about a lot more. Pilgrims who set off on the road to Canterbury in the middle ages, for instance: just as I do, they surely brought a whole grab bag full of petitions and thanksgivings along with them.

They brought their whole grab-bag self, rejoicing, muttering, praying, cursing, scratching, farting, kneeling.

If Chaucer tells us anything, he certainly tells us that. He tells us they went a-pilgrimage as much for a change of pace, and of scenery, as for pious adventure.

And who knows what they found along the way, each of them? And what I’ll find?