Waiting for John

I'm in San Diego. It feels strange to be here after almost two months. I feel like things have changed in the city; the climate has changed; the feeling here has changed. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting used to Miami (Gawd!! Don't say that!).

What hasn't changed is my home and John. It's such an amazing thing to see a person you love and care about so much standing at the bottom of an escalator with flowers in his hand after you've been traveling for eight hours solely to see him. I was ecstatic to finally wrap myself into his arms after what seemed an eternity.

And now I'm waiting for him again. His boss planned a meeting for this morning . . . no one is too happy about it, the day before Thanksgiving . . . and so I am sitting in his office writing a blog and trying to pretend that it doesn't matter to me that the mere 48 hours I have with him is slowly ticking by while he waits for this meeting to begin, his boss is running late, in the other room.

Nothing every goes exactly as planned.

The flight last night was very turbulent. One of those experiences where you actually think about all the things you didn't do in your life now that you're about to die. The plane was rolling back and forth and we were falling on top of one another and even the big linebacker boys sitting behind me were whimpering. Just a little bit.

I had a book of "Sudoku" puzzles with me. These are wordless logic puzzles that have you searching for the proper placement of number 1-9 on a grid. A huge craze in Britain, Sudoku will always remind me of Anthony Michaels-Moore and the Fanciulla cast in general. He brought a book of these puzzles in one day and by the end of the rehearsal, the entire cast was gathered around him trying to solve one of the grids. After that, every day was Sudoku day. There is not a moment of rehearsal where I could not look over to the chairs on the far side of the room and see at least two singers holding a pencil poised over the book with their eyes bugging out. During the sitzprobe, when they weren't singing, singers were surrounding Anthony on the back of the stage trying to figure out where the numbers went. "La Fanciulla Del Sudoku..." it was an opera-wide obsession.

Anyway, I had my own book that I picked up at Miami International, and I was trying desperately through the flight to concentrate on placing the numbers correctly. I guess I thought that if I worked hard enough on the puzzle that the turbulence would go away. That keeping my mind limber would ensure my safety somehow...

I'm here now, so maybe it worked.

I also read "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer on the first leg of the trip. This is a memoir by a journalist (Krakauer) who was a member of the Mt. Everest expedition in 1996 that met with huge disaster when a storm came out of nowhere and stranded many of their team members above the last camp. 12 people died and the book details the experience from the point of view of a member of the expedition. It's heart-wrenching (gut-wrenching) and, while giving a pretty good journalisitic account of the experience, also shares with the reader an incredible sense of helplessness and survivor's guilt that Mr. Krakauer (and others) are still dealing with. At the outset, the story didn't really seem like my cup of tea, but the writing style really grabbed me and I suddenly found myself more interested in mountain climbing (summit seeking) than I ever thought I could be. It's a painfully human story of a revelation of mortality and a drive to succeed beyond rationality. Pick it up.

That's all for now. As soon as John is done I'm going to hole up with him for two days and be thrilled with my existence. Then it's back to the horrors of Miami. Thank god I like the poeple with whom I am surrounded.