Almost (!)

You know you've been blogging for awhile, too long -- maybe, when you find yourself mimicking the exact same subject you wrote about on the exact same occasion you did the year before not once, not twice ...

(been there with the identical 2008 and 2009 pre-Christmas snow-ins .... and duplicate O'Hare outgoing madness )

.... but 3 times in 1 week.

This time the culprit was (wait for it) the return Christmas flight from Minneapolis.

I am always wistful on my return flight to Boston, from wherever. Even the rare times when a man is waiting at Logan to pick me up, me dying to see him. Even when there's an afghan to crochet or a pile of Christmas letters to address. Even when I'm drenched in a cynical, non-focused haze of self-regard like the one I can't seem to shake this season.

I desire, more than I desire most things, the possibility of a connection with a fellow traveller. I'm not a romantic. But what is romantic in me is easily stirred by the random encounter and (what seems could be) its endless possibilities.

Sunday, it actually kind of happened at MSP.

The storyline isn't special:

Brief flight delay, an hour to spare. Feel restless, carrying too much baggage to walk laps, with no desire to sit waiting. Desire instead a mid-afternoon Chardonnay and the Packers game at the bar across from the gate. Find a man on the next stool on his 8th hour of trying to get to Chicago, on his 3rd standby list, on his 3rd (or 4th?) tall Bud Light. (Gregarious, blond, animated.)

Enjoy inebriated bitch session about O'Hare and standby lists. Discover you both work in finance. You both love Boston. Pending his place on the list, you are on the same flight at 3:19. Talk so animatedly the guy on the other side of him leaves in annoyance at being left out.

Then ... lose track of each other in the slightly confused rush to gate upon realizing the time.

It's a natural part of the storyline: you will always lose each other in the slightly confused rush to the gate. As if stepping outside the bar confines is the harsh light of day after a one-night stand.

It was OK. He's a youngin'. He lives in Chicago. He drinks Bud Light.

But even that remote connection, for 15-minutes on the E Concourse at MSP, gave me and my resident cynicism a lift, at least until I stepped off the plane in Boston and resumed my real life.