off to Iceland - SundayApril282002

setting: Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York

There was a miserable rain falling this morning when I took Sally for her walk, but the weather hadn't prevented a race from being run on the ring road around Prospect Park. Some guy in an orange slicker stood at the top of a low grade near the entrance to the Vale of Cashmere. He was clapping his hands constantly and urging the runners on. These miserable-looking water-logged runners, you see, were no ordinary Sunday road racers; all of them were "special needs" people. Some ran on prosthetics, some rolled along on wheelchairs, and some looked so physically un-"special" that I was forced to conclude there must be something "special" going on in their heads. File this scene away for the next time you hear the phrase "rain or shine."

Today Gretchen and I would be flying to Iceland, and this meant we'd have to be entrusting our keyads to someone else. Normally that someone else would be Eulalia, but she's so busy these days that Gretchen had to find a replacement. In this case it was Gretchen's friend Becky Delagl!o and her boyfriend. If you need a mental image for Becky Delagl!o, just picture an Italian-American woman in her early 20s who occasionally inspires gossipy conversations about how hot she is. Becky arrived shortly before we left and Gretchen printed out a map of Prospect Park to show her all the places to walk Sally. Later, on the car service ride to the airport, Gretchen accused me of "checking out" Becky, which was totally unfair.

Things started getting Icelandic the moment we entered Terminal 7 of JFK. The woman who gave us our boarding pass looked like a suntanned version of Bjork, complete with the tiny dwarfish ski-jump nose and rectangular facial structure. This was, I would soon observe, a common look in Iceland. Coming from a place as anthropically diverse as New York City, it was easy for me to jump to the conclusion that Icelandic people all looked the same.

Given its international destination, our Icelandair plane was small. It was one of those twin-engine single-aisle planes familiar from my LA-to-East-Coast flights. We weren't exactly plied with copious amounts of free alcohol either, though wine did come with our "lite" dinner.

The plane didn't have many free seats, but we were nonetheless were determined to have the three seats on our side of the aisle entirely to ourselves. So we sat down in an empty row and took off our shoes and kicked back, only to be evicted by the rightful occupants, a British couple. So we moved back a row and dug in again, anticipating with dread each new person walking our way. "Oh no! It's another homeslice!" I'd tell Gretchen, but then he would either stop well short of us or proceed past. Somehow we managed to hold onto our row.

View a gallery of pictures from this adventure.