The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E.

I think I was fourteen when I won the trip to Disneyland in Anaheim, California for selling subscriptions to the Ogden Standard Examiner. We lived in Brigham City, Utah at the time and I had my first and last paper route. The man who delivered my daily inventory told me one day that I was a single subscription short of qualifying for the trip. When my parents heard that they happily bought one more subscription and I was on my way. At the time I thought they were just helping but in recent years it has occurred to me that I might well have been a bigger pain in the ass as a teenager than I thought I was. Anyway, I made that trip but to this day remember almost nothing of my first trip to California other than a very long bus ride.

I liked California so much that I waited 46 years to make second trip. I was going to re-connect with an old friend I had not seen in nearly 20 years. Alain and I had first met in Charlottesville Virginia when he was hired by the same company I worked for. Shortly after he signed on we both were offered a chance to move to Fredericksburg and move we did, into the same gated community where we became close friends. I'm not sure I would go so far as to claim we finished each other's sentences but our minds did spend a great deal of time in similarly skewed universes. I've never been too fond of the concept of 'best' friends because of what that says about the rest of the people in my life but if I have to claim one it would be Alain.

Alain left the company after a couple of years because, I think, it just wasn't what he wanted his life to be about. Sometimes I wish I had done the same but that's for another time. He left and went back to California and has been there ever since except for a few minor displacements to places like Africa (Peace Corps gig) and Richmond Virginia selling televisions and working for the American Red Cross as a traveling vampire (without portfolio).

We reconnected for one brief snowy weekend in the mid-80's and then he and his ex-wife and son somehow got out of my life yet again. I don't understand why we let dumb stuff like that happen in our lives but we do. (I have been charged with being a dumb ass many times but never convicted even though I was clearly guilty.) It's really a stupid thing to happen and we should know better. How is it we hold on to grudges and slights with a death grip and let friends slip away?

I can't remember what triggered the Google search but a name like Alain's was pretty easy to search on and in a matter of less than an hour I had located him and his business in Murrieta California about an hour north of San Diego. (One of the great things about locating a person via the internet is imagining their surprise when an e-mail pops up in their mail box from someone they haven't spoken to in almost two decades.) For the next year or so we chatted back and forth by e-mail interspersed with a very few phone calls.

Alain has repeatedly invited me out for a visit and I have always found feeble wimpy excuses to postpone the trip. Finally this year all the excuses had been used up and I decided to go. The delays were never about not wanting to see Alain again but came strictly from my own conviction that as soon as my plane took off, everything here would go to hell in a hand basket. Bad things are always just waiting to happen, right? Tsunamis, earthquakes, alien invasions and swarms of locusts are waiting just over the horizon to wreak havoc on my world. If I am here, they are afraid to show their scurvy faces.

The decision was made though and despite the looming and imminent catastrophes I found my way to the long term parking lot at Dulles Airport at an absolutely heathen hour on Wednesday June 22nd. America West was the airline that was not going to feed me that day so I figured that arriving two hours before flight time would leave plenty of time to get something to eat. Check in was easy but by the time the shuttle bus got me to the correct gate I was convinced I had ridden at least half way to the west coast before I even boarded the plane.

Stay tuned for the adventures of an air travel wimp with attitude...