In a Moment

The best thing that I can think about airports is that sometimes these are the only places that we really have time to think about where we have been and where we are going. Being in the airport early in the morning or late at night - seemingly in brisk daze of flight numbers and gate codes that remind me of the ticker at the bottom of a news channel telling us how much we have lost or gained. A bag full of nothing important and a head full of all that mattered, meandering through this portal, passing people that will never know your name…where are we going?


In late December of 2001 me and one of my best friends Lynsey, flew to San Jose to visit her brother K.C., another dear friend of mine. He was teaching there at the time and Lynsey and I were both freshmen in college. I remember my Grandfather Buddy (step) telling me about the San Francisco he had known - in fact he and my parents helped me to finance that trip. I am sure that they were all worried but none of them bothered to hold me back. This was less than three months after 9/11 and security was seriously heightened; Lynsey and I were nineteen years old. The places that she and I have seen since then, together or separately, I am sure are greater because of that trip. As Joni Mitchell says so eloquently - " But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads and say I've changed. Well something's lost and something's gained in living every day."

Today I thought of that trip, maybe because it was misting rain. The same way it was the first time I ever laid eyes of the Pacific. Standing in a soft mist looking at an ocean that had been a picture in a book to me before that moment. The feeling of being somewhere else, somewhere that you always wanted to be, see, touch and feel - what a feeling! I remember being in Sly's Jazz Bar in Monterrey, a city that I found to be absolutely enchanting. I sat and listened to a lady in long dress sing "As Time Goes By." As her dress blew in the breeze from the opened windows I sang along knowing that I was in love with that moment in time. That was almost nine years ago, nine years since I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, nine years since my first String Cheese concert…nine years.

My have time has changed, Joni you were oh so right! My old friends probably do laugh and say I'm strange…but I always was and maybe that is what they liked about me. I know it is what I liked about them. I know what you meant when you said: "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day." Thank God for that! It would be too exhausting to be young and foolish all our lives. Not that I'm not still young and a little foolish some days. Times change you, cities and people, family and friends, places in time leave a mark on us. These things help to strike a chord within and the moment that happens we come to the realization that from that then on we will see life from a different aspect. We will still be the same but tweaked. Thank God for those moments too. One day the collection of those moments will help us to reach the age of wisdom that people like my Grandfather did. The collected impact that those moments make turn us into what we become. After all we are all works in progress…thank God for that too!