Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 6

Competition. . .

—From CB—

One of our special skills as humans is comparison. Where are we in the particular pecking order we choose to peck in? This may be a survival urge fomented by the competitive nature of our culture and economy: as a kid I played second base on our church softball team, largely because there was no one else to play it. And we mostly lost: God personally didn’t give a shit, being more concerned with college football.

But I had fun. And I was fortunate in not basing either my career plans or my sense of self-worth on my batting average. My mom’s doing: as long as I ate my oatmeal, I could do no wrong: God loved His stumbly little second baseman. And if He didn’t, Mom still did.

These thoughts spring up in response to a post on a Facebook writers’ group, bewailing the fact that his book, despite his hopes and his friends’ encouragement, bombed. The usual responses to a universal situation: review the phrasing of your query letter, hire an editor, don’t commit suicide. I didn’t respond, largely because I had to clean the cat pan. And because I don’t like to give advice, especially when anyone has a startling realization such as “We’re all going to die.”

But I’ve been thinking. First, “bombed” has any number of meanings. Did it sell? Did it get bad reviews? Did it change the writer’s life? Did it hunker off to a smelly stack on the shelf? I come from a background of writing for the theatre; we’ve had a few prestigious productions and thousands of low-class touring gigs; and we’ve patched together a decent living—this despite the occasional bad review and an utter stinker in the NY Times.

Since moving to prose fiction, it’s been a lonely pursuit. It’s easiest for folks to watch Netflix, more commitment to go to a movie or play, and a long slog to read a novel—I rarely devote the time even to read the work of friends. At the age of 81, I have no compulsion to write a best-seller or make a career. Of course I want my stories read, and a reputation might secure that. Yet I look at the full output of writers who are “known,” and only a handful are known for more than one book. What induced them to go on writing past that one?

On weekdays, we go to the gym for brief workouts. There’s probably “comparison” there, but it’s beside the point. There’s old people and young, men and women, and they seem to be focused—we are at least—on personal benefit, not on who lifts fastest or heaviest. You set your own weight, you have your own practice, and if there’s competition, it’s yourself with yourself.

Any voluntary activity should be the same, IMHO. “Success” is self-defined and accidental, and hopes generated by stories of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, or even by Herman Melville or the latest self-published hotcake, are as irrelevant as the stakes won in Las Vegas. Quality alone doesn’t sell; it’s a good idea, among many factors affecting sales. But unless someone (agents, publishers, booksellers, Amazon) thinks they’ll make money off your story, it won’t go anywhere. That’s life in the zoo we’re a part of. That’s no critique of the “gatekeepers.” Like us, they have to make a living. That’s just the way it is.

Not easy to accept that. Tons of folks play the Lottery, and it seems as if more are writing novels. The only advice I have: decide what you truly want. If “success” means sales, by all means do what makes it “marketable,” but don’t quit your day job. If it means doing the best you can, then start another draft. I made some decent plays at second base and even got a few hits against truly frightening pitchers, but I never made the world series.

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My Journey. . .

—From EF—

I have a specific place of the heart in France, Bretagne, and the connection is deep and strange. Decades ago I visited the stones at Carnac; not the circle pattern made famous by Stonehenge—these are smaller rough stones laid in parallel lines, many kilometers long. Something spoke to me. I don’t know how else to say it, but something in the earth there knows me, and every year I have gone back to hear what it is saying. Covid interrupted that, and the last time I was there was 2019. This return was immensely satisfying.

I gave myself three days on the island of Belle Isle, a 45-minute ferry ride from the tip of the peninsula of Quiberon, whose northern root is at Carnac. I know that island. It’s 10+ miles high and 5+ miles wide, and over the course of years I have walked every foot of its coast, navigating the detours required by the western coast’s array of fjords. It’s no joke that it’s called Le Cote Sauvage, the savage coast. Years ago I carried a beeswax ball containing hair from CB and me and buried it in an ancient tree-stump—a way of anchoring us for the years to come.

My bigger deal is Carnac and its energy. Some speculate that the long lines of stones are mapping the earth’s ley-lines. That may be. Years ago I carried my dowsing rods with me, tools that measure energy, not just for finding water. I positioned myself just outside one of the stone-lines, held the rods so their tips were a hand’s-width apart, and stepped into the alignement (the French word for the stones.) The response was so strong that it nearly tore the rods from my hands. OK, yes, I was really feeling something.

Someone on Facebook asked if I found what I was looking for. I can’t say, because I wasn’t looking for anything, I was returning to connect, the way you would hug a friend. I was resuming a conversation. I will only know after time what was said. I think there is a very deep part of me that is outside words, and it has already had the conversation. In time, it will come to me, probably in dreams. I am content to wait.

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Alone, with Cats

—From CB—

Very early, I drove Elizabeth to the bus stop. Much easier to do the 7-mile trip to the bus than the 2-hour drive to SFO. She’ll be gone for eight days, visiting her special stones in France, while I’m surviving here.

It’s always strange. Long ago we realized that we spend so much time in each other’s hip pockets that it’s good to take some time alone. Mostly, that’s a single day, but sometimes it’s more extended. As we get longer in the tooth it’s more difficult—I spent a week walking London in the wrong shoes and still show bruised toes—but until we’re stretched out dead, we’ll persist.

Providing for absence, it’s much more than just the feeding schedule for cats. This time, it’s brought home to me just how ignorant I am of basic things. The cats and the garden, of course, but much more. How to replenish the pump if the water fails; how to turn off the power if there’s a surge; how to operate Messenger for voice-to-voice; how to tend my various wounds and disabilities; etc. etc. etc.

My long-ago Ph.D. (near mythical by now) didn’t really prepare me for practical matters. I know I’m not entirely in the clouds—doing yardwork and dish-washing and layouts and writing and whatever’s needful in the day—but I’m so dependent on this woman, not only to haul my ashes but to tend my fires.

The things I took pride in—acting, directing, design, playwriting, puppet sculpting—and the things I had to do to support these—writing grants and news releases, designing promo, sorting bulk mail—are things of the past. They’ve left memories, but they’ve also left piles of paper, computer files, and eighteen bins of puppets for our kids to dispose of when we croak. They’re valued parts of a goddamned interesting life, but they’re no longer marks of achievement.

I tend to disparage myself, but that’s a pose. I blame my mother for an overinflated sense of my self-value. From the earliest I can remember, I’ve held two attitudes: first, that I’m vastly superior to the bulk of humanity (an attitude that has the saving grace of holding myself to a much higher standard); secondly, that no one will recognize it. That still holds.

It’s a challenge, but those times apart are treasured. Perhaps mostly because they force the question, a hard one to answer, “Who am I now?”

And age has its rewards, even apart from 60+ years with this woman. You realize how few artists are truly immortal, and your work is likely superior to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, though not to Dickens. You take pride in your children. You find love in your mate. You last as long as you can, and you’re finally grateful for all the help that you get.

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A Different Reunion…

 

—From EF—

         My first solo trip to Europe was 1998, to visit our daughter Johanna. She had just relocated to Italy, having had time to compare her life-experience during her college year in Firenze and what she was discovering back home after graduation. Beginning with that trip, I went every year for more than twenty years, sometimes with CB, sometimes solo, stopping only with the onset of Covid. Early on, I made a soul-connection with the prehistoric standing stones of Carnac, in Brittany, and I am about to reconnect.

         Much earlier, during a family trip, we had all visited Carnac and I was fascinated with the difference between that site and Stonehenge: I could walk right up to a stone and embrace it. It was a different concept. Not a circle, it was a set of parallel lines that stretched for kilometers. That embrace engraved itself deeply, and in the trips since 1998 I kept edging closer and closer to visiting Carnac again.

         I had three years of near misses. My return trip was always booked from Amsterdam, and the complicated train connections from Paris to Auray to Carnac and back to Amsterdam always left me with a connection I couldn’t make, but I kept getting closer. When I finally made it with a night to spend in the town of Carnac, I discovered that Carnac’s white-sand beaches enrapture the French vacationers, and I almost had to sleep on the street. Then I discovered the hostel on Belle Isle, a short ferry ride out to sea. It was a lovely clean affordable refuge, and on Sept 19 I will be breathing a sigh of relief to be making up my bunk bed there again after four years’ absence.

         I can’t explain the soul-connection. I usually tell people, “Something in the earth there knows me.” Early on, I found an overgrown narrow path between a horse pasture and a hayfield. The fragrant flowering hedgerow had attracted a dense cloud of bees, but I took a deep breath and walked through them unharmed. When I came to a tiny grassy space, I sat down there to eat the sandwich I’d brought. In the quiet, two baby field-mice toddled out from a bush and settled down near me. I gave them breadcrunbs, and they snarfed them up. Then the young farmer who owned the land came down the little path, found me, and I explained in broken French why I was there. He welcomed me, and invited me to pet his very young new foal. He had his just-walking baby son with him, and I realized that this year’s connection was about the threads of new life. It went on from there.

         In the years to come, I realized that I was feeling something inexplicable from the depths of the earth there, and I wondered if it was my imagination. One year I took my dowsing rods along. When I held them loosely in my hands and then stepped into the lines of stones, the rods almost ripped themselves out of my grasp. Yes, there is something there.

         So I will have five quiet days there, three on Belle Isle, and two more at the narrow neck of the peninsula of Quiberon, where it is a short local bus trip to Carnac. I will visit the ancient cross where I have surreptitiously buried life-tokens for me and the three other strongest actresses I know—we will all be hanging out there together in the afterward, if anyone wants to find us.

         I will have five days to ground, center, and reconnect. One of those days is the Autumn Equinox, smack in the center of the stay. I will savor the final steps to the summit, and the beginning of the descent.

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Forgiveness. . .

—From CB—

Recently, there was a long debate in a writers’ group on Facebook about “forgiveness.” One contingent felt that forgiveness wasn’t possible unless the sinner acknowledged his sin. Others felt—and I tended to agree—that forgiveness was more a clearing-away of attachment, that holding adamantly onto it was, in a quote from Anne Lamott, like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

I avoided taking sides. I was startled—well, no, I kinda expected it—that a writers’ group would be debating a word that no one ever defined: what was the sin, how dire was it, what was the relationship to the supposed sinner? Was this a major crime, or was it an accidental toe-step? Was it a stranger or your beloved? Did repentance demand a casual “I’m sorry” or the refund of a thousand bucks?

Myself, I’ve only held two grudges. One was a guy who hurt a friend of mine, the other was someone who cost me money. I rarely think of either, and we’ve not had contact for decades. On the other hand, I’ve accused myself of many things, none of which can be forgiven to the persons involved. In either case, as sinner or sinned, I understand the character and the reasons for the sin. At least that’s what this writer does.

But I had the privilege, even in high school, of reading several books on general semantics. The basic message: the word is not the thing. What does the sign concretely refer to? Are you talking about the same thing? “Love” can refer to a locust invasion of things: ardent lust, obsessive focus, murderous possessiveness, or Heinlein’s beautiful, demanding definition: a state where the happiness of the beloved is essential to your own. A vast range, meaningful to the individuals involved, but every color of the rainbow.

The same range of meanings form prickly skins on other abstractions: wealth, happiness, patriotism, faith.

Fine to argue about what’s best, but absurd to carry forth the quarrel without knowing you’re speaking of different things. When the talk veers into “You should do it like this,” beware. In the writers’ group, such questions may beg for an answer, e.g. “Is a story in first person better than in third?” I can offer my own experience, but it’s usually in the form of “Depends on the story” or “Try it both ways.” Or “Is ‘Bold Killers’ a good title? Title for what?

Too many people are primed to honk when I slow down to make a turn. Or they may just honk to be heard.

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My Earth Is Changing. . .

—From EF—

When Conrad and I came to California in 1963, the first time I put my bare feet on the ground I knew, like an electric shock up my spine, “This is my home.” We were there for three years, and then it took thirty-three more to come back—to come back home.

A thing that captivated me immediately was that my skin could be open to embrace. The air, the sun, the rain, the wind, anything it had to offer was something I could get close to. Coming from a childhood in north-west Indiana did not prepare me for this kind of bliss. My childhood pagan-self immediately said Wahoo! and hugged the earth skin to skin.

In 2000 we moved permanently to Sonoma County, and soon thereafter I started constructing raised beds for vegetable gardening. Our area has one population above-ground that tries to neutralize the other population below-ground: gophers. It’s an arduous task to put gopher wire down below ground level to protect the new growing area above, but we did it, and for years our effort bore wondrous fruit.

Things change. Gopher wire is not immortal, and replacing it is a Herculean task. I was stubborn and did this replacement for a number of years, but one of the things that changes is physical stamina. I am not now the person who dug out the entire underside of the house when we first moved in and discovered that we had a problem. I am definitely not the person who put in daily shifts at the bottom of a six-foot shaft to employ a 50-foot snake to clear the leach-field pipes. I find that now aspiration and ability do not always mesh.

So now, the sad state of my garden hurts. For two years, the normal spring has gone awry. Early abnormal heat in February kicks buds into action that have no pollinators yet awake. Sudden bursts of leaves are then greeted with abnormal killing frosts. Plants do their best to adjust and then are greeted with long spans of killing heat and absolute drought. My tomato plants that in previous years were heavy with red fruit are hung with a few small grass-green burps.

I have used my gardening as a potent fertilizer for my spirit. The imprinting memory of union with the earth in 1963 is still there. But today, I have to revise my day to do any earth-work in the early morning, and I need to schedule more hours to carry water. The plants are feeling it, too, and at the end of August I am seeing the first green tomatoes, whereas my old July job was to keep up with the blizzard of heavy red fruit.

My old earth-lover has changed her tune. I can’t reverse this. I am working to accept and adjust and embrace what is now her pattern. But I’ve gotta say, I miss what I had.  

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Tapdancer. . .

—From CB—

What’s the point? I’ve asked myself that all my life and never come up with an answer—except maybe “That’s what I do.”

Right now, we’re preparing TAPDANCER for publication. No deadline: the world isn’t waiting with bated breath. It’s gone through the usual procedure—69 submissions to agents, 23 to small publishers, all rejections—and now self-publication, with modest sales likely. It involves endless hours of layout on Indesign, hours of designing the covers, and now an oral reading to catch any typos or spasms of literary diarrhea. I read, my co-writer and editor Elizabeth follows a printout.

It’s a great pleasure. I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever written, certainly the funniest and friendliest, and it deserves to have a life. Beyond its long life.

It began with a tearful dream. A friend and long-time colleague was convicted of defacing a billboard that bore an obnoxious political slogan and was sentenced to death by lethal injection. In the dream I watched him die.

As happens often, in outlining it as a play, it changes texture: don’t ask. We had an offer. A theatre in Seattle (we were in Lancaster, PA, at the time) offered to host us for a week’s run of a show we were touring, and at the same time give us the daytime use of their ensemble actors to work on something new. This became TAPDANCER.

We’d improvise all day with them, transcribing and writing all night. In a week we had a play. Their work was wonderful, marred only by the fact that when we gave it a reading, most of the cast hated it: too namby-pamby on the political implications, we gathered.

At the time, we were negotiating moving from our Lancaster theatre to a rehearsal studio—that’s another story—and weren’t certain how to stage TAPDANCER. At last we opted to stage it in a different facility in Lancaster and a very small stage in Philly. It was a hit, not overwhelmingly so, but a hit. Later, we did an audio version, and it was staged by another theatre. I did the draft of a novel, redrafted it, and let it lie fallow. I also attempted a screenplay, which mostly encouraged its gradual drift into the surreal.

It was only with the advent of Covid and strictures on our touring that the move to prose fiction was furthered. It lay there beckoning. Three drafts more, and it seemed ready.

It’s taking its time. I have about a dozen or more short stories I’m working on, and Elizabeth’s pushing forward on the second volume of her memoir. The calendar shows us we’re respectively 81 and 83, not the point where literary careers blossom suddenly. But plays, novels, short stories are like children. Even if the world doesn’t care—it has its own problems—you have a responsibility,. You nurture your stories as you’ve nurtured your children. That’s what you do.

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The Cottage. . .

—From EF—

A friend did a Facebook post on his river cabin, complete with a photo of his wood-burning kitchen stove. It catapulted me into an intense memory journey to a Michigan cottage I knew from early childhood, and I want to share it. It hasn’t existed for a long time, having been renovated into a modern behemoth by my dad for their retirement, so this is a reincarnation of its jewel-like place in my memory.

My mother had been a professional vaudeville comedienne, and the cabin in Cadillac is something she’d acquired before her marriage. It had, deep in its walls, the lovely emotional aroma of something that had been totally hers in her outlaw days when she had her own rowdy theatre friends who could come hang out with her in the woods and drink themselves silly in safety. These are my memories of its childhood, and mine.

Small, two-story, wood-shingled, not insulated, and delightfully drafty. Interior walls that could be painted were jade green and chinese red, and it had a tightly-coiled teeny corner staircase that felt as if it made at least three revolutions in getting upstairs. The cottage was always closed up for much of the year, and the aroma of must and mold became the fragrance of summer vacation for me.

The kitchen was small and magical. It was dominated by a huge cast-iron wood-fired cookstove that had more chambers than a New York apartment. Round iron circles could be pried up with a tool that looked like a mangled screwdriver, and you could stir the coals inside or add wood to rev it up. It had two ovens, a big one below and a smaller gentle one above the cooktop for keeping things warm. There was even a water tank that kept water hot to make stew or coffee happen more quickly.

Over by the door was the icebox, which worked with real ice—a huge solid block that had to be chipped with an icepick to get it to fit. I loved it when the ice-man came with his big blocks nestled in sawdust. Water came from an iron pump outside and got brought in in buckets. No running water, no faucets, and I don’t have a clear memory of how dishes got washed. I think there was a sink, but wash-water went down into a galvanized tub and got slopped on the ground outside.

I was not charmed by the outdoor two-hole privy, especially if I had to go after dark. I don’t know if there were spiders, but I was sure they were the size of dogs. I always wanted to run like hell back into the house when I was done, but I’d catch hell if I didn’t remember to dump a big scoop of lime down the hole. I do think we actually had a Sears catalog out there for paper.

Downstairs in the living room there was a big elegant Victrola, taller than I was with sleek curved sides. At first I was too small to be able to turn the crank, but I was really really proud when I finally could make it go by myself. The only record I remember vividly was an orchestra playing a Russian dance, one of those tantalizing things that starts with a majestic slow drag and keeps speeding up until everybody falls flat from exhaustion.

I slept upstairs, the room at the top of the stairs, and there was a mysterious square hole in the wall that opened into the next room to the right. Nobody could ever explain to me what it was for. It was normally closed with a board cover. Down the little hall to the other side of the cottage there was a little closet in the corner with a toilet seat in it and a chute down to the ground floor. I was told not to ask about it, and my room had a china pee-pot for emergencies.

The main bedroom was on the lake side, with a long narrow screened-porch adjoining, echoed by a twin porch on the ground floor. In the early years of my memory, there wasn’t electricity either, and I was fascinated by the process of cleaning, filling and lighting the kerosene lamps.

Eventually my father got “that look” in his eye, knocked out the wall between the living room and the screened porch, and closed it all in as a bigger room. That was the beginning of the end for that graceful little cottage, and eventually my vacation fragrance was raw lumber and drywall.

But I treasure the cottage’s childhood, and the adjacent empty wooded lots where I could forage huckleberries and wintergreen. I still get moist eyes when I see jade green and chinese red together, and it makes me hear the echo of a Russian dance that needed a crank to keep it at top speed.  

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Tribe. . .

—From CB—

In my periodic attempts to comprehend the human race, I start with the recognized belief that humans evolved in interdependent small groups. These groups formed tribes, and that made good survival sense. You couldn’t go out to the mammoth store and buy a prepackaged mammoth: you had to go out in a group, with at least some guys knowing to do it, and then drag home its parts, where others knew how to cook it. Division of labor, partly gender-specific, but it worked okay in its context. And from what we know from present-day “primitive” tribes, the CEO of the mammoth-hunt didn’t glom a bigger hunk of the beast. He just offered his wisdom for the survival of the tribe.

We’ve come a long way, baby, but we still have the hunger for tribe. Even in historical times, the worst you could do to a malefactor, short of death, was to exile him from the city. Now we have international mammoth-hunting corporations, held together by salary, and exile isn’t an option.

Sports teams (at least up through high school), live theatre events, musical groups, etc., are held together by competition, applause, but above all, tribal identity. Of course that doesn’t last long for talented individuals for whom the NBA contract, the movie deal, or the solo concert tour takes precedence, while the early group is just where you “got your start.” The high school football team doesn’t stay together and at last join the NFL. Not even in Texas.

The military is an anomaly. Of men once together in combat, many stay in touch for years. Marine fathers may claim Marine sons. Doddering elders from a forgotten war will don their moth-riddled uniforms and parade on a holiday. Is this because, like the mammoth hunt, the stakes were really high, or is it evidence of our need?

What accounts for the fandom of professional sports? We recall the spirit of cheering our high school basketball team, all students at our high school, no ringers from South Omaha. Perhaps we recapture a hair of that by cheering for Cleveland, though not a single player is from Cleveland. It’s not really our tribe, but our need is so profound.

Political movements feed on the longing for tribe. It’s obvious in any form of identity politics, in ganging around a single issue, in wearing a certain hat, in cheering a leader. Of course, the grouping we choose is affected by our own values, but the intensity of connection—and the difficulty of changing minds—flows from our need for tribe. To change your mind is to exile yourself from your nearest and dearest.

A present-day subset of political groupings is the Conspiracy Theory or Thinking For Yourself, whichever. “Yourself” most often is a tribe, simply one that’s tuned to a special website and a special group-think.

Traditional ties have undergone steady deterioration. Family is something to escape from, and ethnic identity—a very strong tie in this nation of immigrants—is in decline. The most common experience now is the anonymity of the city, and the greatest threat is isolation—and the hunger that attends it. Marketeers are at the head of the pack in understanding this, but politicians are picking it up by fits and starts.

Feminism, racial balance, and gay acceptance have all gained strength from this hunger, but at the cost of strengthening their opposition. What is the tribal identity for straight white males that doesn’t get mocked by someone? What can I feel a part of?

In my view, the future belongs to the outfit that throws the best party: never mind the band or the booze or the gender balance—it’s the party that makes you really want to be there. To feel part of the mammoth-hunt, even if you’re vegan. I don’t deny the rationality of human endeavor, but since high school I’ve doubted that that’s a big factor. For me it’s finding our tribe. I’ve had great empathy with human life, and I want human beings around me, chanting the chant of my tribe.

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Respect. . .

—From EF—

Our house is near a sharp bend in our country road, and several times a year somebody driving with more speed than sense enlivens the night with a crash. Mailboxes, tree, utility pole, whatever, it’s a screech and a thump and the local people grab their pants and their flashlights. I have seen the skill and speed with which the utility workers work to put things right, whether it’s replacing a pole or just splicing wires. They know what to do and they care about doing it well. I really respect those guys. The suits may be greedy assholes, but the guys who do the work are great.

Our gas utility decided it was time to do safety checks on all their meters and pipes. A worker showed up with a “sniffer,” which looks like a rubber funnel at the end of a stiff hose; it beeps if it detects gas. Alongside our studio, it beeped. I said, “That’s right over the septic tank.” He called a supervisor, who asked if I could prove where the tank was. No, but I showed him the exact location; they shoved a rod into the ground and heard it knock on the concrete tank. Not good enough, the company would probably require them to excavate. The supervisor saw my dismay and paid attention when I told him the tank had a crack in it, so he sent for a super-sniffer that can tell the difference between natural gas and poop. It confirmed poop, saving us from the excavator. Those guys could have done the bare minimum: sniff, report, order the excavator, and move on, even though they knew clearly that we’d be left with a gross mess. No, they cared about their work, went to the next step and took the time to do it right.

After I’d spent last Friday night trying to sleep on the bare floor of the St. Louis airport, dawn came with no news about our aborted flight to O’Hare. The plane had been refueled, everybody’s luggage was still on board, the crew was taking their mandatory 8-hour rest period, and a 2 PM departure was still listed. There were multiple podiums in a semicircle at this end of the B gates, but all morning there were no agents anywhere. At 1:45, there were still no agents, no announcements, no updates, nobody on the tarmac around the plane. At 2:15 I figured the only thing I could do for myself was go take a leak, and on the way back I passed a guy in his United blues with cap and epaulets, and I stopped him. “It’s my business to imagine how folks are feeling. I get the idea the United agents are in a state of panic and don’t know what to do.” “Well, yeah. I’m part of your flight crew. We’re all here and ready to go but nobody is making it happen.”

By 2:45 at least somebody had changed the board and listed us for 3 PM, but still no agents, no announcements. Suddenly, a stocky red-faced woman in United garb, black hair plastered to her head with sweat, charged down the corridor to the podium and grabbed a mic. “OK, everybody, I’m boarding this plane the old-fashioned way. Group One, get up here and get on the plane! OK, Group Two.” And so on. The crew was already aboard. We still had our last night’s boarding passes, went straight to our seats, buckled up and took off. I got the strong feeling that blessed agent just knew her job and did it on her own. She had seen the misery of 150 people stranded since 2 AM, and did what needed to be done.

Let’s hear it for the people who do the work.

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