Texas Vacation: Day 0 – On the Plane
We rise through the drear and punch through the overcast and suddenly we’re looking down on mountains of heaped clouds, dazzling white in the sunlight. When we bank left, my window fills up with this billowing, Seussian landscape; when we bank right, the view turns a perfect azure blue. I don’t fly enough for this to have become ordinary yet.
The plane levels off, and the seatbelt lamps go out. A snack cart trundles by, followed by a stewardess in a smart blue uniform. We’re heading south and west toward Texas: my former Paradise.
When I was a kid, I had a simple, Manichean view of the universe: Beirut, where we lived, was hell; Texas, where we vacationed, was heaven. Come summer, we’d pile into a jumbo jet and take off from Beirut’s rickety bullet-ridden airport and fly west for eighteen hours straight, toward the promised land. I’d spend the time staring down at the Atlantic, or roaming the aisles, or watching movies, or playing the sorry excuse for handheld video games we had back then. When I was very young, the stewardesses would sometimes come by and give me toys, or show me around the plane, or let me sit with them in their special stewardess seats. Eventually, they stopped doing that — pretty soon after I really began to enjoy it, I imagine.
It’s hard to describe the sheer, blinding joy that came over me when I stepped off the plane. Texas was better than Beirut in every imaginable way: there were widely-spaced houses fronted by big green lawns; there were malls filled with bookstores and arcades and movie theaters; there was television all day, every day; there was touch football and theme parks and water rides and central airconditioning and hamburgers. There was going outside whenever you felt like it. It was beautiful, rapturous.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, of course, and the obverse of that deep and profound joy was the mind-crushing despair of going back home. I remember one dark evening in Lebanon, the day after we got back from vacation, running up and down the hallway of our apartment, jumping up at the midway point to slap at the cord that hung down from the attic trapdoor, over and over again, like I was caught in some feedback loop, thinking: I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I was a whiney little bastard, but the self-pity only lasted for a week or two.
We moved to the US for good when I was thirteen: not to the promised land of my earlier youth, exactly, but close enough. I can still remember looking out the car window on the way out of the airport, watching the trees scroll by, marveling at the sheer greenness of everything. It wasn’t Texas good, but it was still very, very good.
I take all of this for granted now. The big clean supermarkets, the constant supply of electricity and water, the freedom to move around, the wide open everywhere; the green. I’m jaded, ungrateful. I wonder if this return to paradise will shake me out of my complacency, and help me remember how it felt back then, when everything was new, and shiny, and perfect.
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