Above Saint Elias / Advent Day 7

Thirty thousand feet above the Saint Elias Wilderness, we’re winging our way to San Francisco. Matteo, giddy with energy, just spilled some water into Marin’s lap. Now he’s standing on the arm rest to play with the overhead controls. The light just came up, through the windows in the past half hour, with ghosts of sentinel peaks marching far, far below.

How quickly moods replace one another on a travel day. First the dark, existential strangeness of wrong-time waking and vacant-road driving to the airport. We have a lot of this, flying to and from Alaska, leaving the house at 5:00 am or catching a 1:30 am flight, crazy behaviors speculating a timely Seattle connection. Then the timeless conviviality of the airport wait, kids running around, people working. Then the dim silence of the tubular jetliner interior, rocketing into the dark, nodding it’s travelers off. Finally, two hours into the flight, the light comes up and it’s another day, the coffee, Seattle’s Best, pours down, cup after cup.

Yesterday we got our skiing back, just in time for us to leave town. Since Thanksgiving, the nordic skiing in Fairbanks had been trash, and getting worse. People were cruising into icy corners, careening into trees and going down for the season. I stayed away, since having a 50-pound caboose named Matteo back-loading my downhills was a prescription for disaster. But yesterday morning Marin announced on her way out the door (into the dark) "It did snow some." By the time I got Teo geared up, I realized she wasn’t kidding, some four inches of blowy, feathery snow. We packed the "chariot" and drove up to Birch Hill, but Matteo was content to soldier the 1/4 mile up the stadium hill, and (because the snow was too deep for two sets of skis to progress down) chug down in Papa’s embrace, instead of sitting impassive inside the chariot and letting Papa power him around for an hour. At the end, he was mostly stalled halfway up the hill, pushing snow around with the baskets of his ski-poles (!).

Why are we all going to SF? So I can sit with a counselor/pastor who will decide whether I have a future in the Unitarian Universalist world. The news out of Oakland, where I’m going to be "assessed" as a UU "aspirant," is mixed. Boston told me in August I needed to be cleared by Oakland before beginning the aspirant process. They’d help me with half the $2,100 Oakland fee. Thursday they reversed. I needed to be an accepted aspirant before they’d pony up. Catch 22.

Other breaking financial news ("breaking" as in "break the bank") – we are getting an HRV for the house while we’re gone. Another $4 or $6 K. But we will be able to sleep downstairs again. We’ll set it on "blow radon away, the BRA setting."

To give some perspective, in the "Advent, Waiting" sense, here’s something I was reading in the plane, a review by James Wood (in the New Yorker) of a new translation of Tolstoy’s "War and Peace:

"(War and Peace is full of) the triumphant "insignificant trifles" of family life. Prince Andrei, the professional soldier, the brilliant adjutant to General Kutuzov, falls in battle; Napoleon, the genius of world history, falls in battle; but the amateur, unheroic blunderers, Nicolai and Pierre, survive into peace, surrounded by women, who do not understand warfare, and by children, who must not. To live, the poet Yehuda Amichai writes, is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time: "And to finish the harbor / long after the ship has gone down."

This, as we steer our family ship into a berth in San Francisco Bay.