We're flying the unfriendly skies

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We're flying the unfriendly skies

Mostly I go with the flow, count my blessings, remind myself how lucky I am because, really, how can I complain about airplanes and flying when for countless centuries people, even rich and powerful ones, couldn't fly, flight a longed-for achievement of which I am a direct and privileged beneficiary.

And that's the thing. The airlines love that we — most of us — are still in the thralls of, "Wow! Isn't this incredible? We're 30,000 feet in the sky and we're not falling!" I may not be the most appreciative flier, but I am always, always appreciative when I land safe and sound. The truth is…

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Happiness is finding magic in the everyday

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We were on vacation at Rock Harbor waiting for the sun to set - my grown children and their young children, all of us way out on a jetty, the sky pink, the night clear, the bugs, for the moment, somewhere else.

A steel band was playing, calypso music; not Old Cape Cod, but it was nice, festive.

The little kids didn't stay still for long, though.

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

It's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?

This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?

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Lewis: beyond pity or fear

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Pity gets in the way. You know people don't want pity, so you stay away.

Discomfort is a problem, too. Yours. Theirs. Should you go up and say hello? Would a hello be mistaken for pity? What would you say after hello? What would you talk about?

Someone is in a wheelchair and you'd like to ask, "How come you're in a wheelchair? What happened?" Only those sound like the wrong words and because you don't know the right ones, you say nothing.

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The place where time stands still

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The dream was a subconscious effort to hold on. I dreamed about flowers, fields of vanda orchids, red hibiscus, pink plumeria, hibiscus, anthuriums, birds of paradise. The scent of the flowers followed me out of the dream, along with the heat of the sun, coconut trees rustling in the breeze, waves crashing against the shore.

My husband told me I sang in my sleep. "Hello, sweetheart, aloha. Aloha from the bottom of my heart." "You were actually in tune," he joked. I have never sung in my sleep before. I have never sung this song while awake before. But then I have never felt so removed from reality, so at peace with the world, so content - not in years, not since I was a child.

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