There's no place like home, part 3

I flew back yesterday from Washington, DC, where I’d spent the week attending a conference for work. (As a quick aside, Tuesday night I attended a gala which was truly a gala, and not at all what I expected. The National Guard Youth Foundation puts the gala on and has a lot of corporate donors so it was pretty swanky.)

But what I really want to write about is the flight back. I’ll leave out the details around American Airlines canceling all their flights from DC to Boston and then telling me they could get me home on Sunday. I flew home on US Air instead and sat in a window seat next a daughter and her father en route from Dayton, OH. The father’s name was Victor, and I think the daughter’s name was Victoriann but she was soft spoken and I’m not positive I heard her correctly. She auditions at Berklee today on violin and then they fly home.

She was nervous about flying and the flight was a little turbulent at first. So I chatted just a little with her in hopes of distracting her—I told her that normally planes land from the east at Logan so we’d fly over the Atlantic Ocean as we came in, unless the winds were wonky. In that case, I said, we would come in from the south. I asked her a few questions about her upcoming audition and then as the flight settled down we both returned to our music.

Once we broke through the clouds on our descent, I wished I’d asked her if she wanted the window seat because she was clearly trying to see things. So I pointed out landmarks to her. I asked her if she ever watched the show Fringe (she did) and I showed her the John Hancock Tower and told her the show said it was the FBI headquarters but it wasn’t really. I wanted to show her the Prudential but it was gloomy enough that I don’t think she’d have known what she was seeing. But as I pointed things out to her I realized that uh-oh maybe Boston is home after all.

In the taxi on the way to the apartment, I looked around at things like the Charles River (which has thawed) and the Citgo sign over by Fenway and thought that I know more about this place than I realized.