What’s in My Bag: Flying Alone in a Troubled Time

I’m off to Italy for ten days, staying with a friend in her rented apartment in Tuscany. Navigating yet another airline app, I just printed my boarding pass, then saved it on my phone. It got me thinking back to the days of travel agents and airline tickets sent by messenger to my house, back to the time before cell phone apps, before dressing and packing to get through security was necessary, before flying felt so anxiety producing.  

I first flew alone at age ten on a DC3 from Newark to Nashville and back for a visit to my maternal grandparents. Several family trips to tropical islands followed, then a summer spent in Europe as a college student. In my twenties I moved from the East to the West Coast for graduate school, flying back and forth at holiday time. Next, married and then a mother, trips to visit the in-laws or travel for work, including chaperoning students on an exchange trip to the Soviet Union, became the norm. After the kids grew up and tuition payments were over, travel for fun became possible again. My husband Dan and I logged many air miles across four continents. Now, as a widow, I’ve come full circle. Aside from family trips with the East Coast offspring to see the West Coast offspring, I fly alone. 

I am well aware that being able to choose where I wish to land is a privilege, even if it sometimes feels like I am anonymous, herded into steerage along with so many others, competing for overhead bin space. Once again on my own, I pay extra for guaranteed carry-on availability and early boarding, not to mention a bit more legroom. I can lift my suitcase by myself, but I no longer have Dan’s winning smile and broad shoulders to assure that it gets stowed in proximity to my seat. Nor do I have his help in figuring out how to get from terminal 2A to 2B at CDG, or how to handle a missed connection due to some situation outside of my control. There is no travel agent or HR person to smooth over any travel turbulence. But I manage: overpreparing, checking things twice, including my anxiety.

I am still ten-year-old Patty at the tummy-dipping stage of take-off. I still marvel at the topography below as we climb, looking like either a game board with pieces moving along arteries as if by magic, or lit up at night like a LiteBrite toy. I still feel a thrill of excitement when landing, awed by the fact that somehow, even though I still don’t understand it, I have flown through the sky for thousands of miles and returned safely to earth. 

But as I embark on yet another adventure, I cannot help but think of those many others who find themselves traveling alone, with so much baggage to handle, in competition for space, navigating blockades, security forces, fearing for their safety, no boarding pass in hand, managing horrific situations that make my own travel worries seem so mundane. 

I know full well that freedom doesn’t guarantee the absence of loss, of insecurity, of fear, of hardship. But it does mean being able to fly above the fray, if only for a short while, feeling wonder and hope, something I need so much right now, something I am so grateful for, something I so wish for every other being on this planet. May those innocents caught on either side in the ravages of war find a safe landing.