There and back

I’m not well up on the Odyssey. Isn’t it Homer’s tale of a long trip home? His hero Ulysses wants nothing more than to get back to his wife Penelope, his dog, and the embers of a familiar hearth. Home is that cosy place where nothing changes, that springboard from which a restless man leaves on a hero’s quest. Never mind battling the Cyclops Polyphemus in a cave, or resisting the lure of the mermaid Sirens: as I imperfectly recall it, the theme is his longing to get back home.

We were astonished to learn about the volcanic ash problem, and its possible impact on our return flight to London. I envisaged a dreary and indigent exile, after honouring our obligatory bookings to Miami and New York, where we might have to wait days or weeks till the skies cleared. Gleaning no insights from The Jamaica Gleaner, we eventually discovered that our hotel offered free Internet access. Here we got all the news and rumours. A faint hope emerged that we might catch our scheduled flight on Thursday evening after all.

So we woke at 3am and my son-in-law took us to the airport in Kingston (Jamaica). We arrived at Miami on time at 10am for our onward trip to JFK departing 11.30. US regulations demand full immigration and customs checks at the port of entry, so we were interrogated as to our life histories, castigated for deviations in our form-filling, fingerprinted (all 10) and photographed, despite the same ritual two weeks before on the outward journey. This rigmarole would have been OK were we not standing in line behind ten others. After we’d retrieved our bags in order to check them back in, we were told we had no chance to get on our booked flight to New York. We signed up for a later flight, on standby. Our hopes were not too high, especially when they said they were overbooked, and offered 300 dollars each to the first six passengers willing to take a different flight. In a last-minute surprise, they offered Karleen a seat, but not both of us. We refused to be separated, standing united, her head on my shoulder, before an appreciative throng of other hopefuls. So they booked us on the next flight—this one to La Guardia Airport, not JFK. Would we have time to catch our Virgin flight to London? There was a sporting chance, they said, subject to a speedy cab-ride. I spent the flight getting psychologically ready for this sprint, without any idea what obstacles might need to be overcome; hating the idea of a panic rush.

We were well aware that if we didn’t catch our booked flight to London, we’d be just part of the general backlog, taking our chance with thousands of others stranded away from Europe. So when the pilot told us there was a thunderstorm over La Guardia, I selfishly hoped he would divert to JFK, and then we might still have a chance. But he told us we must go round in circles, in a “holding pattern”, till the storm subsided. Things got bumpy and dark in the thick clouds: then there was a strange noise and a flash outside. I thought we had been struck by lightning, but the pilot said it was “static”. As we descended to La Guardia, I asked my companion in the window seat if he would mind moving to one side so I could take this picture of New York, famed city that I had never visited. I knew it from so many books (R. L. Stevenson’s The Amateur Immigrant, P. G. Wodehouse, especially Psmith Journalist, Eric Linklater’s Juan in America, Martin Amis’ Money, not to mention movies. I knew about yellow cabs. Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver was fresh in my mind.

My companion in the window seat had all through the flight been responding to mountains of email on his laptop. From the corner of my eye, I saw they were written in what looked like Spanish. We got talking. He lives in New York, so he could point out the landmarks: Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and so on. He’s Catalan, not Spanish, and his name is Jaume. He said he was going on an errand to JF Kennedy Airport, and offered to share a cab. So we followed him to the yellow cab rank. As an incentive to the driver I offered an extra $10 if he could get us there in good time. I imagined him weaving through back streets but he took the jammed highway, changing lanes like a man possessed, and speeding whenever the chance was offered, operating so smoothly that we heard not a single horn in protest. In the last five minutes he turned round to announce that we’d definitely be there in time, beaming triumphantly as if this had made his day. I paid him the promised tip, Jaume paid me half the fare. We were all winners. Following Jaume’s guidance, we dashed in to a warm welcome from check-in staff who assured us we were just in time, though five minutes later might have cost us our seats.

But the big reunion was between Karleen and Valerie, her best friend who lives in New Jersey. They hadn’t met face-to-face since 1992. Valerie never got our frantic messages from Miami about delays. She’d been waiting at check-in for hours, without even going to the restroom for fear of missing us, and now she and Karleen had no more than a few minutes to hug and exchange gifts.

Valerie is currently unattached. Now she has Jaume’s number on her phone. Karleen has hatched a plan to introduce Valerie to this kind and sensitive man, if he’s available too.

This then, is my ninety-minute New York movie. I had been full of prejudice against the place. I never thought I’d say “God bless America”, but I found myself saying “God bless New York”: the words came to my atheistical lips whilst we were landing at La Guardia, as I felt that someone needs to guard all those habitations spread out in the afternoon sunshine, vulnerable as anywhere else on earth.