It's not easy getting on the plane alone when you're in your mid-eighties, you're barely five feet tall, and you carry a doctor's letter explaining that it's either the titanium hip or the rods in your back or big toe that set off the security alarm, and not anything that poses a threat to other passengers.
They wand you anyway. Oh, and you're traveling alone all the way across the country. It's enough to make someone stay home and settle for a long-distance call.
But by the time you're done reading this, my mom, who fits the preceding description to an arthritic but otherwise healthy T, will be in her seat on a flight from Phoenix, Arizona to New York, New York, because she has unfinished business to attend to. Twelve years ago, and again ten years ago, she was feisty enough to help move my niece and nephew into their respective freshman college dormitory rooms. Happiest when she is busy, happier still when the environment meets her impossibly high standards, she got on planes to make sure her grandchildren got off to a good start.
My daughter started college two years ago, and by then my mom's contribution to the move-in was an apology. Her back-to-school calendar involved acquiring that new hip; she missed her youngest grandchild's set-up.
We survived without her, if only because the room was so magnificently dirty that benign neglect was not an option; it demanded the all-out efforts of three girls and three sets of parents working their way through the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedrooms, piling belongings on the mattresses until it seemed safe to start putting things away.
Still, my mom kept apologizing - and when we rented a shoebox apartment to spare ourselves two more years of moving-and-storage trips, the frequency increased. She tried writing a check to purchase a bookcase and a chest of drawers, but it wasn't satisfying enough.
She wanted to be there. So we invited her to visit. I said I'd fly in from California to meet her.
For a couple of weeks we wrestled with Byzantine itineraries that would enable us to fly together, but they required her flying to my home town and waiting or me flying to her home town and waiting for her; they added at least a day of travel on each end, which bumped into the boundaries she'd drawn for the amount of time she wanted to be away.
Four web sites and advice from one of her friends later, we found a round-trip from Phoenix, and I bought the ticket before we had time for second thoughts.
I've traveled a good deal as an adult, and I take a bit of pride in my navigational abilities, as well as my creativity: I once asked a Milanese cabbie to drive slowly to my destination as I followed him in a rental car, after a maze of one-way streets defeated me four tries in a row. My mom's life was not like that. When she traveled, back in the day, it involved an assertive husband and travel agents. She was covered from all sides.
She would be concerned about this trip even if she were ten inches taller, ten years younger, and still in possession of her original hip and big toe. This is brave. This takes a lot of psychic effort, if a few too many conversations about www.weather.com and the location of the hotel.
I try to focus, instead, on the small good news, which is that a small good woman is sitting in her aisle seat alone. A writer I know got a terse bit of advice when her daughter's family moved across country, which boiled down to, "Shut up and get on the plane." Spit out your anxieties and go to the airport, the train station, the bus station, the job interview, the whatever makes you quake. It's far too easy to quake these days, and who knows if courage will make a whit's worth of difference. Do it anyhow. Grandma did.
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