Epilogue: I like to fly redux

About twenty four hours ago, I sat in a plane that, from a standing start, headed west and leapt into the sky. At this point I should be clear: I did not rough it in India. Yes, for two weeks I worked harder than I ever have before. I dug and mixed and hauled. But I had a bed and hot water, and when I left for my tour I lived in nothing but the lap of luxury while traveling a land of squalor. So don’t feel it’s out of character for me to admit I upgraded to business class on my way back to the US. For double the price of my economy ticket, I got a row to myself with more legroom than I could use. I got incessant food service catered to my taste. I got a seat that reclined back flat where I could roll over and cuddle with a slew of pillows. Worth. Every. Penny.

I finished my Gandhi biography. I didn’t like it. I know. I’m the devil. But Gandhi was a whack job. Sure, the man bested the British Empire without violence, but that doesn’t make him someone I’d want to hang out with. The book was mostly about his eating habits with a bit about defecation thrown in for excitement. How can you live a life bent on securing freedom for hundreds of millions of people and write such a boring book? Granted, he didn’t have time to keep it up to date before he was assassinated. This is a warning to us all. Keep our biographies and tell-alls current. We don’t want our murderers to go undocumented, o we?

But reading it, along with awesome camel ride, made me crave reading Lawrence of Arabia. I looked in every Indian bookstore I could find, but their English book sections are devoted to second hand copies of Sue Grafton novels. So I boarded the plane with nothing but the Paul Auster I gave up on (my Habitat group leader recommended I give it another try, so I was considering it). But I was thrilled to find Lawrence of Arabia as one of the ten English movies Air India stocked on my video unit. If you haven’t seen it, it’s three hours of epic bliss. It makes me want to bury myself in the sand and bake for eternity. I should have toughed it out through another film or two, but I couldn’t stay away. I slept for seven hours. That meant that today, for me, began at 3am. I watched some more movies, listened to some music, and landed in JFK feeling refreshed, but like I’d been up for most of the day already. Yes, Air India lost one of my bags. A bag filled with gifts, so don’t be impatient if you feel you’re due. But they think they’ve located it back in Bombay so stay tuned.

Landing in New York, I was greeted by the shining sun reflecting off wide, clean streets. The western world is a fantasy of industrialism compared to India. It’s impossible to imagine the spanning of the gap between where this ancient civilization got stuck, and where we sprung to from out of nowhere. It must be our lack of history, our freedom from mistakes of the past, that’s enabled us to come so far so fast. Fueled by our rich surplus of resources, we are the epitome of the eighteenth century ideal of a nation. And that’s great. But what will fuel the twenty-first century’s vision, and where will it be fulfilled? Not here. We’re all used up and searching for answers to last centuries problems. Not India. They’re abandoning their current problems and hoping they’ll die off while a first world nation is born. By my count, there are too few frontiers left to support the founding of a new world. No doubt there are those with vision eclipsing mine. I hope someone’s listening to them. I hope they have an Isabel to give them a few ships and a crew to get where they’re going.

Tomorrow brings the second decade of the third millennium since this guy was nailed to a piece of wood. Maybe it’s the fifteenth millennium since we dropped from the trees. More importantly it’s the fourth decade I’ve walked the earth. I’m closer to forty than I am to thirteen. Only the fact that’s more depressing to my father than it is to me keeps me going (sorry dad). I figure I’ve got about fifty or sixty years left. I gotta get moving.