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I think that is when I noticed, too, though, how frequently the photos arrived. Quickly I lost count of how many mornings I woke up to one or two or three or four pictures of his day. The university at first light or his kids riding their bikes. A temple, a train, a cup of tea. Sunset from a balcony, or the morning mist rising from the mountains.
Laos had been the last country in Asia to report a single case of COVID-19, and even deep into the second year of pandemic registered only a few score cases. Nao Kao suspected underreporting, but except for the occasional scare, usually a migrant worker returning home, there was no denying that COVID was virtually non-existent there. Nao Kao was not confined to his living room. A waterfall. A wooden bench. Morning mists suspended from a valley floor.
On their own, any one of these pictures was a mystery. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it matters tremendously whether six of them are “I think you might like this,” or “wishing you were here with me.”
Without the guideposts, I was lost. If there was a larger message, it fizzled in the echoes of time and space and culture. Only months later, did I begin to suspect that the pattern – the message – was woven into their cumulative total: I believe you might like this. I am sharing with you.
Not infrequently had I rolled the marble of his remark in what I still think of as the early days of our conversation, the days when much of what we discussed revolved around piecing together the past. When I revealed that one of the prongs of what had happened was connected to my mom, he seemed surprised, and maybe a little hurt.
“I remember your parents fondly, the New Year’s party, the times they invited me to join you all for dinner. I liked her. She didn’t like me?”
“Oh, she liked you just fine then,” I assured him. “But that was before well, you know…” I still could not bring myself to put words to all that had transpired.
“Would that bother her so much?”
“Only because, as I’m sure she would have told you herself, that is not the way she raised me.”
Being Rachael Zick’s daughter was often its own trial. When your mother has received a Genius Grant, when she is fluent in four languages and conversant in three more, when she commands a lecture hall as easily as a Scottie dog, and has the great and good of the world at her fingertips, with a contact list – her digital rolodex – that was the stuff of fairy tales, it goes without saying that lessons abound. Half the members of her audience might not have realized they were in her thrall, but my mother’s mastery of the iron fist in the velvet glove was never lost on me. The formidable and illustrious Rachael Zick scared the hell out of me, and she and I both knew it.
“Just make sure she doesn’t grill you about texting some weirdo over in Laos,” Nao Kao replied, ignoring my moralistic barb.
At the time it was his self-deprecation that struck me, especially since Nao Kao Inthavong was one of the least weird people I knew. Much later I wondered if he already realized – or decided – what I only slowly came to understand: the conversation was not ending anytime soon. It was that marble that I polished so regularly, for I was all but certain that assiduously and assuredly Nao Kao had led me onto this flight.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
The first timeis a rush, you know. The first upgrade. The first pounding shower in the Sky Club, the almighty water pressure washing away the weariness of a transpacific trek. The first time they greet you by name. Like an addict whose tolerance for the dope grows too fast, the intrepid business traveler seeks a more powerful hit. The airlines are only too happy to oblige. The domestic upgrade whose chief perk is overhead bin space, and perhaps a sandwich on a longer flight, gives way to upgrade certificates that will see the traveler from Detroit to Singapore in the finest style commercial airlines can offer.
Later she appears, the woman holding a sign bearing your name on the jet bridge. With her, you are whisked into another level of the traveling elite. You slip out the secret door, clattering down the metal steps to the tarmac, sliding gracefully into the heated, leather seats of a gleaming Porsche. You are literally and figuratively under the wing of the airline now as you ride past the catering trucks and maintenance crews, a journey few travelers even know is possible.
There are other doors, the hushed tones of the first-class lounges, the chef-curated menus to nourish you between flights or during the long delays. From made-to-order dinner in the JFK Sky Club to the heaping baskets of goodies in the galley, it is possible to nosh your way nonstop from the moment you pass through security until the flight attendant announces that the time has come to stow your tray table and return your seat to its upright and locked position – and your suite door to its open position.
Gratis.All of it – and like a dealer giving the first hit for free, the airline knows its business. Addiction.
The tracks on your arm – that is, your soul – grow more vast and in the search for a vein that has not yet collapsed, you must travel further and faster, frequenter and frequenter, collecting heart-shaped spoons and Tumi bags; telltale photos of God’s hour, the sun peeking just beyond the tip of the wing; and stories, always the stories, of the flights gone awry, the meals we regret, the adventures hard won. At some point we decide: the small dramas the airlines bestow with such alacrity are merely the price to be paid for gazing upon the wonders of the planet.
I like to think I chose this life, but it’s equally possible that it chose me. The mystics might put it down to what the stars foretold, but so many early adventures all but ensured it. I thought back to that heady middle school summer, the joyful weeks I spent on the jagged edge of France while my parents tended to their academic responsibilities – the research, the workshops, the paper presentations galore. While they razzled and dazzled the finest minds, I spent evenings around tables piled with the day’s catch, the sounds of laughter ricocheting through the gardens, the dull crash of Atlantic rollers just audible during the rare pauses of our animated words.
I thought about all of this as I looked out the window near the lavatory. One of my headphones popped out as I bent over, and I marveled at how noisy the aircraft cabin was. I tried to imagine what it must be like to step onto a plane for the first time as an adult, to experience the roar of the engines not as the soundtrack to a lifetime of memories but for the first time while traveling to a wedding or a funeral or a long-anticipated week at the beach. Flight was an integral part of my life and my earliest memories are pockmarked with airplanes, but I tried to imagine how it would feel to see the world from above for the first time and know it was an experience worth remembering.
Few clouds marred the view and below us the Alaskan range was blindingly bright, the shadow of the plane dancing across the mountaintops and valleys. I thought again about a colleague’s belief that people could be sorted into two categories. There are those who are ofaplace, she posited, who are born somewhere, and inhabit it so fully that it becomes part of their essence, and there are those who are of any place, who live a little here and a little there, equally at home in the tropics or tundra, megacities or mountains. Maybe, I had countered, it is only a matter of stasis. We are born to a place and, living there long enough, are simply unable to escape the way it seeps into our marrow and becomes as much a part of us as our blood or our bones. Inertia is a powerful force. An excuse, as much as a truism.
I grabbed a few squares of Ghirardelli, giving wide berth to the bananas. Bananas disappear quickly in coach, where the (mostly) novices packed in three- and four-across see them as the healthy snack option.
“Never order the eggs,” a flight attendant told me once, “and remember that the bananas are frozen.”
Along with “time to spare, fly through O’Hare,” it was the best travel advice I have received in my years of crisscrossing the skies.
I took another look at the basket and snagged a couple more Ghirardelli squares for good measure. In an hour or two, the dark chocolate with sea salt would be gone. Salt improves the flavor of almost any food, but never more than in the din of an airplane cabin. The body craves the savory – and salty – when sailing through the skies.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
For the pastseveral months, as we traded texts, I had been ribbing Nao Kao about the books he read – or didn’t. Once or twice I made suggestions that fell flat, but undeterred, I still thought he should read more than the management and leadership titles that are the purview of MBA students. An acknowledgement that he used to love literature and had not realized how much he missed it was the closest he came to conceding the point.
“What’s your favorite Hemingway” surprised me then as much as anything he might have texted me at 11:00 p.m.
“Moveable Feast,”I replied without thinking.
No matter how far professionally I had drifted toward Asia, I was still a Francophile at heart. Of course, the book in which the expatriate world of 1920s Paris, peopled by authors smoking and drinking and filling reams of paper with the books that were to become a staple of American literature, was my pick.
