My Trek West Has Begun…

I’m now sitting in the airport waiting to get on my flight to LA. (At least I was when I wrote this--no airport WIFI so I’ll be posting this from the hotel.)

Do they have thoes new “air puffer” machines in your airport security area? I was told they installed them about 6 weeks ago here in CVG. You walk into this glass booth, about the size of a phone booth. A recording says “air puffing will now begin,” then things get windy. My hair flew up; my skirt flew up—it was all very Marilyn Monroe. And also very startling; I squealed a little. Apparently the air thought I was OK.

I stopped at the newsstand to pick up a copy of Glamour for the plane (a supersize special issue with 3 cover models) in case the novel I brought from the giant stack on my nightstand isn’t doing it for me. The girl in the store asked me if the guy on my shirt was my boyfriend. It’s John Cusack. She didn’t know who he was (hasn’t everybody seen Say Anything?) then she accidentally called me Mom. She’s a teenager, so I guess technically I am old enough to be her mom, but it made me feel an itty bitty old.

Then, as I dragged my luggage through first class on the way to my cheap seat, I saw a couple whose kids I babysat--get this--22 years ago. Ahhh! I need to read some picture books so I feel like a kid. (If you run into me at the conference, it would be really sweet of you to tell me how young I look.)

The cool thing about my airport experience thus far is that the bus at long-term parking picked me up right at my car. (Note to self: Row E22) And soon I will emerge from my plane and be somewhere in the vicinity of 80 degrees and the world won’t feel like a big unshuttable oven (as my friend Meg put it).