Take off: the lark ascending

My bag is heavy. There are two and a half kilos of camera equipment, a novel by Hemingway about islands the Gulf Stream, the TimeOut guide to San Francisco, a digital sound recorder with batteries, earphones with batteries, pencils, erasers, spare socks, and a laptop and its soft case. The bag alone weights a kilo.

Two things lighten it: a crocheted flower and a book by Dr Seuss.

Jen & Kate

Jen cooks me dinner a week before I fly. Her house is warm from the oven and it smells of rosemary everywhere. There are almond muffins on the bench for later with a base of her blackberry jam. She hands me a newspaper wrap that fits in the palm of my hand. I unpeel the tape: ‘It’s a forget-me-not. To take with you and remember you have friends when you’re alone.’ Green, blue and sun-yellow. I rub my fingers over the wool and put it in my pocket.

***

Kate and I suffer from bad timing. First she gets sick and can’t make it to Saturday drinks. Then I sleep late on Sunday morning and get breakfast in a café on Lygon Street and have French toast made with thick-chewy sourdough that does not soak up the egg well and comes with rivers-of-fat bacon and maple-flavoured syrup. I go home and thud down and moan. An hour later I get an email. There is a package at my door. If I was home when she came it is the only time in five years I regret the bell not working. It has the Paul Simon DVD I lent her two years ago, a relic from when we saw him with Art Garfunkel in Melbourne, and Kate’s copy of the Concert in Central Park. And in olive green paper and a black ribbon, a book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

Take off

Nine minutes before pushback and Engine No.2 is wide open showing everything that could catch fire. A man in a yellow vest is leaning his elbows on some paper on the lip of the turbine. The tail looks like it has been cleaved in two places with a great axe. I decide to get on board. When I do the captain says they are ‘signing off the paperwork on some maintenance’, like no-one noticed.

I take the forget-me-not out of my pocket and keep it in my hand. I don’t really want to fly. As we taxi I try to find something on the music channel that will help suspend my belief about taking off.

I play something that starts with three chords, soft as a shepherd treading on unwalked grass. Strings and the woody clarinet. Soon a gentle stirring. A trill, low-hollow, on a single violin. Stirring, fluttering. Fluttering, floating. Falling, flutter-floating, falling, flutter-flying and then plummeting, plummeting high, its breast open to the uncalculated wind, swooping soaring sweeping and singing itself into a whistle so thin the wing feathers of the lark ascending trace curveslips of air so far above everything until they disappear.

I repeat it three times. The plane climbs and climbs. I keep the wool in my fingers until we are over the sea and then I put it away until we come to land.

I find the Rough Guide to Mambo and the rhythms of the timbales and the cowbells and the brass beat and clang and blare. I take out Dr Seuss and read about where the feet in my shoes will take me.