Glenn Kubish

I almost missed everything again. This happens to me at airports. I expelled myself inch by inch down the aisle of the small plane and emerged onto its railed stairway to see a tarmac worker below waving two wands. In baton semaphore, he ordered the string of passengers to walk along a path marked by thick white paint and into a covered passageway. This is what everyone did. This is what outlines do. Under the canopy, I was moved up a ramp, compelled to follow the flow of shuffling feet and bumping suitcase wheels ahead. We all turned switchback-style up toward the next turn. And then the thunder of an airplane gathering its power and departing the earth shook the enclosure. Through a crack in the wall I saw the Southwest Airlines jet as it pointed into the sky. Blue and red and yellow. I almost missed that I was someplace else.

A gloved hand connected to an arm visible up to the elbow emerged from the booth and then an index finger unhinged and indicated the precise spot on the pavement where my car would stop and the questions would begin. "Where's home?" was the first. "Edmonton," I answered. The gloved hand had retracted, and, with its mate, shuffled our three passports under the gaze of a skull that moved up and down, looking at the documents, looking into the car, looking back at the documents. Our information was sucked in through eyes curtained by green-tinted sunglasses. Purpose of your visit? "Purpose of your visit?" "Just a holiday," I offered. This was the border, and this was the focus-group interrogation in which I provided an account of our time in Seattle. And of what was in the Thule roof carrier. And of why we were stopping in Vancouver and why our youngest son had travelled ahead of us, failing with a misplaced joke about children...

We have been on the road for a few days now, and, this evening, after three nights in a rented North Beach apartment in San Francisco, we are at the Cardinal Hotel in Palo Alto. Shelagh and I just played checkers in the lobby after walking back from watching a movie at the Aquarius Theater on Emerson Street. Tomorrow we will walk around the main quad at Stanford, drop into the bookstore to look for some Christmas presents, and then head south for Monterey and Carmel. North Beach We've been to Alcatraz. And Caffe Trieste. We shopped at Al's Attire. We had breakfast at Mo's, lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, dinner at Frances. We've moved by foot, cable car, boat, and Mustang convertible. We sat in Washington Square. We walked by Jack Kerouac Lane and down Haight toward Ashbury. We took pictures of the Joe DiMaggio playground. The sound of unseen cables running beneath the streets, the hot smell of the hydraulics, the thrill of cresting a hill while standing on the...