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what not to do on a public piano in an airport
Sunday, August 6 2017
location: somewhere over Greece
I awoke from my slumber and looked out the window to see a regular pattern of comma-shaped shapes illuminated with a partial city-grid pattern. I soon realized that this was what a city looked like when it was partially-obscured by a cloud pattern having lots of comma-shaped voids. We were somewhere over Greece or perhaps nearby Bulgaria at the time, with plenty of Europe left to fly over. Game of Thrones had depleted the batteries on my laptop, so I was now forced to watch whatever was in the airplane's media library. Whatever it was I found, it didn't leave a lasting memory. I was still full from all that Ethiopian food I'd had at Betty, so the vegan airplane food piled in my lap went mostly uneaten. I tried to squirrel some of it away in my pack, but Gretchen would later say it had been disgusting, so I would be throw it (and a small bottle of red wine) away soon after arriving in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.
At Schiphol, we had to go through a security checkpoint after getting off our flight; evidently making it through Ugandan security is not sufficient for being turned loose into Schiphol's secure area. This why I had to surrender my red wine, and probably that disgusting airplane food as well.
Once inside Schiphol, Gretchen needed to reprint a lost boarding pass. In so doing, she asked one of the friendly KLM ladies where we might find the most comfortable seats. We had a six hour layover, and the prospect of doing that time in a typical gate seating area was despiriting. (Gretchen had looked into possibly going into Amsterdam to spend that time, but there's not much to do there on a Sunday morning.) The KLM ladies suggested we try out the seats between the E and F terminal. These seats looked like recliners, though they weren't as comfortable as they appeared and couldn't be adjusted at all. But they were much better than normal airport furniture. I aslo found a source of 240 volt power nearby, and I even had the European-style adapters necessary to plug in my American equipment. That all worked nicely for a time, but unexpectedly at some point all the outlets in the area went dead. Another problem with this place was that it was next to some play equipment for children (the equipment was a hard-to-describe structure covered with shag carpet). The children kept screaming and jumping from their play structure to the seats into which I'd plugged my equipment, and I kept worrying about them kicking the wires loose. I looked over at one point and a stupid white kid was standing with Gretchen's phone between his feet. "Can you maybe not stand on the phone?" I asked as I scooped it up. Later on, the toe-headed (presumably Dutch) boys were joined by a very screamy (but otherwise cute) little Arab girl.
At some point I realized I needed to download some more files for any work I would want to do on the plane, and this sent me to another set of comfy chairs across the pedestrian traffic, over near a bathroom and room set up for the changing of diapers. There was a piano in that area that was open for anyone to play and initially someone with actual piano chops had been playing it, but by the time I was seated over there, some idiot was using it to practice familiar piano standards like Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Gretchen, who got a woman to watch her stuff while she came over briefly, was dismayed that anyone would be so rude as to practice piano in such a public space. There was working electricity and extra seats in this new place, but there was also that piano, a screaming baby, and the temperature of the indoor microclimate was unpleasantly chilly. But eventually the baby shut up and the piano went quiet, so Gretchen came over and covered herself with a blanket. By this point it was almost time to start boarding our airplane.
For the final flight of our trip, we got stuck in conventional seating in the four-seat unit in the middle of the plane. Gretchen got the aisle seat and I got the one just inside from that. Thankfully, there was nobody in the seat to my right. I was delighted to find that the 220 volt outlet at my feet actually had power, meaning I could do whatever I wanted to my laptop (though there would be no internet). But while waiting for the plane to get up to cruising altitude, I watched Life, Animated a documentary about how an autistic boy managed to develop language skills by watching and obsessing over animated Disney movies. There's something fascinating about autism, since it seems to simultaneously conceal and reveal human talents and abilities. Unfortunately in Life, Animated, we meet up with our autistic protagonist after he has already developed his language skills (and even gotten himself a girlfriend).
A dose of ambien ensured that I slept (or did something similar to sleep) during the middle three hours of the flight. Gretchen looked over at one point and noticed I was drooling on myself, and she put my seat back in hopes of reorienting my head.
For some reason customs was unusually quick and pain-free at JFK, and the only real delay was waiting outside the airport for the shuttle to our parking provider. We were home by 6:00pm. The animals were all accounted for, but they (particularly the dogs) seemed vaguely traumatized. Nothing terrible had happened to the house, though our house sitters (who had left before we arrived) hadn't left us a particularly clean house. There was, for example, a lot of litter box scooping that needed doing.
Still on East Africa time, I climbed into bed before darkness had descended.
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