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Beneath the Hat

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Beneath the Hat

Tag Archives: Airport

Mysterious and Strange

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections, Travel

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Tags

Airport, horses, mistakes were made, paranoia, personal feelings

Today I was thinking about my Omens of Ill Fortune post and I realized that aside from my freshman year, something always went wrong whenever I was about to head back for undergrad at Sarah Lawrence.  More than that, it was a gradually escalating scale of bad.  You already know what was on the high end of the scale if you read the Omens post but in case you forgot, I have two words for you.

Walking pneumonia.

But my sophomore and junior year were similarly plagued.  Granted, the sophomore year incident wasn’t so bad.  The night before I was going to fly back I was cooking dinner and put my hand on a pan to get it out of the oven.  No glove because I’m a special genius who understands how ovens work.

(Still not as bad as when I put a towel in the oven because my brain told me it was totally normal, we always put the towel in the HEATED oven.)

So I scorched myself but I’d pulled my hand off fast enough that the skin only went a little red.  Thoroughly chastened, I put on oven mitts and and got the pan on the stove.

Where I then proceeded, not five minutes later, to stick my bare hand on the pan handle to adjust its position.

And yes, the handle is metal.

No, it hadn’t cooled.

This time the burn was not mild because I’d gone and wrapped my whole damn hand around the handle.  My palm got a taste of hell’s inferno right then.  The worst part had to be me just yelling out loud at myself as my mother looked on in bewilderment as to how I’d possibly made the same mistake twice in under ten minutes.

So I’d gone and done the cleverest thing possible.  I had a blister on my right hand not twenty-four hours before I’d need to be using it consistently to drag my suitcase around the airport and then later, you know, unpack my dorm room.  Awesome.  Wow.

Junior year a horse stepped on my back.

The story there is that Brego was still young and slight.  These days he’s a muscled-up freight train of elegance and poise (while still being a total dork sometimes) but in his early years he wasn’t the most sturdy.  You wouldn’t be either if you kept having dramatic growth spurts just as you started filling out.

It’s our last ride together and my trainer has us on the lunge line so she can control the pace of what we’re doing.  Everything’s fine, very routine, until something frightens Brego out of his skin.  Now I never saw what it was but according to witnesses a golf cart took a turn a little too quick and appeared.  Horses aren’t fans of things appearing out of nowhere.  To this day Brego does not like it when something loud and dramatic sounding happens behind him.

My experience goes a little something like this:

Brego leaps up and to the side, throwing the both of us off balance.  The lunge line is nowhere near enough to keep him steady and even though I had kept my seat, for sure wasn’t going anywhere, we were still tipping.  My weight at the angle we were leaning was too much for Brego to correct himself.  I had about a split second to figure this out and to then make the executive decision to bail.  I couldn’t think of a single good thing that’d be accomplished if Brego and I hit the ground together so I decided to take the fall alone.

This was both good and bad.  Good because a horse didn’t fall on my leg.  Bad because Brego still hadn’t quite gotten his feet under him and I was in his way.

Now, horses don’t want to step on you.  They flat-out do not want it.  No thank you ma’am that sounds terrible.  So when his hoof landed on my back he was quick to get it the hell off.  But even with just a fraction of his weight, that is a goddamned heavy animal.  My saving graces in that situation were how fast he got off me, the give of the footing I’d landed in and the fact it was my lower back so my spine had a little cushion around it.

So after checking to be sure I could still move my legs and getting levered off the ground, we went to the hospital and made sure nothing was broken.  They gave me a Vicodin pill that sent me on a ride to Loopy Town but no permanent damage to my back was found.  I lived on Advil for about a week to keep my back from screaming.  Weirdly, it never bruised the way I thought it would.  At most there was a sort of shadow whereas I expected a technicolor spectacular.

Then once I got back to school I had to move furniture so, you know, great timing.

Junior year was actually triple special on the bad news front.  First, my grandfather passed away shortly before I had to go back.  Then the last ride I had up where the horses live ended in catastrophe.  And then when I finally got home to pack up, Hurricane Irene canceled my flight.  Talk about a series of unfortunate events.

Then finally there was senior year with the pneumonia.  I actually can’t believe I hadn’t thought of how bad luck would smack me up the side the head every time I went back to school after summer break.  That might be a good thing, though.  I might never have gone on to grad school there if I thought there was some malevolent spirit gradually upping its game every time I flew back for a new year.

Come to think of it, I also always got bumped from at least one of my chosen classes so I had to scramble to pick a new one every year.

You know what?  I’m making a note.

Never do anything important in late August.

Ever.

Omens of Ill Fortune

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections, Travel

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Tags

Airport, college hilarity

A bumper sticker told me I was going to get walking pneumonia.

Sort of.

Look, I’m not what anyone would call religious, mostly because I don’t belong to any religion. I also don’t think of myself as superstitious. I’m too contrary for it. As a kid I decided thirteen was a lucky number for me purely out of spite. But hey, my Brego was born on Friday the 13th so perhaps my contrariness appealed to the universe.

And that tends to sum up my set of beliefs. There are powers in the universe that respond to irony.

Well, I also believe in God but mostly as a benevolent force who finds it puzzling when we’re so mean to each other, especially on His alleged behalf. My belief about the universe’s enjoyment of irony extends to God as well.

Most of all, I think we sometimes get a heads up from the universe when something’s about to happen, good or bad. I know the human brain is engineered to see patterns even when there are none but I’ve seen too many tips of the hat from the cosmos for me to take it for granted. Anyway, I’m a writer. I’m supposed to be eccentric.

My mother was driving me to the airport when I saw the bumper sticker. I already knew the flight would be rough because it was a red eye to New York and then that morning I’d be registering for my senior year in undergrad. Before I could even go to bed I’d need to unpack a few boxes to get to my sheets. But I wasn’t too worried about it. You know, until we drove by a van with the bumper sticker that said, Pray for Kate.

Not encouraging, universe. Not encouraging at all.

I remember laughing at the time because explicitly ominous bumper stickers are kind of funny in the moment. Whoever owned that car probably chose that sticker as a sort of touching gesture to whatever Kate was in their life. But for the random Kate on the highway, it was unsettling.

Er, why do I need prayers? Is something happening? Someone know something I don’t?

The plane didn’t crash so that was a plus.

No, no. What did happen was the day after registration I woke up with a raw spot in my throat. Initially this didn’t seem important. I’ve been sick before and getting sick the beginning of the year wasn’t the end of the world. I’d probably picked a bug up on the plane, boo hoo.

That it was a very weird raw spot in my throat didn’t faze me. The strange, aching pain that would spear up my jaw into my left ear before returning to my throat was probably nothing.

And then my luck got worse. I’d been bumped from one of my classes, a thing that in itself wasn’t so much bad luck as consistent luck since I’d been bumped from a class every year of undergrad. Inevitably it would also be the one that was most important to me, in this case my writing workshop. So to my delight I got to frantically sprint around campus to get a replacement class.

You know that thing people say when they speculate as to how a situation could get worse?

Yeah.

Order up one New York downpour for the girl in the jean shorts and t-shirt, please!

Interviewing for a class soaking wet was just more fun than I can say. Who doesn’t love waterlogged sneakers?

After that, the cough was hardly a surprise.

Okay, I lied. It was a surprise to me since generally when a cold starts with a sore spot in my throat the next step is my nose running. The cough generally attends on the last days of the cold as a sort of herald of glad tidings. Like hack hack, congratulations! Gasp, wheeze you’re almost well!

That was when I cottoned on to the fact that this cold was behaving in a strange manner. So I got my bedrest, drank fluids, and tried not let my teeth clack too hard that one night it felt as though my bone marrow had been replaced with liquid nitrogen. But the cough didn’t get better. Even when I caved to the need for medicine and one of my very dear roommates bought me some Mucinex, it didn’t do the trick.

Then I had to spend my first class of the year alternately strangling myself to silence the coughing or hurrying out to the bathroom for water. On one such trip, after hacking into the sink, I looked up into the mirror and was struck by how pale my skin had gone and how red my lips were. It reminded me of what I’d heard about tuberculosis victims in bygone times, how they left lovely corpses.

Still, I didn’t want to go to the health center. There didn’t seem much point to me since I thought it was just an extremely bad cold and they’d only give me antibiotics, completely useless for a virus.

But then came the day I noticed I was coughing up green phlegm. Finally, it dawned on me.

This thing could be bacterial! I’d been sick much longer than was normal for me and with no improvement made I suspected foul play. After consulting Dr. Google the most likely culprit was walking pneumonia. The only way to know for sure was to finally involve an actual medical professional.

The doctor didn’t make a diagnosis, just prescribed antibiotics as a sort of ‘well, let’s see if that helps but it won’t if it’s a cold’. She made that pretty clear, actually. It was all she had to offer but it might very well not help. When she had me breathe as hard as I could to test my lungs she noted they were in good shape, but then I’d only had the thing a little over a week.

What would determine if I had what I thought I had was how the antibiotics worked.

After the first day’s dosage, I felt almost entirely recovered. That more than anything convinced me I’d been hit with walking pneumonia. With antibiotics, taken as prescribed, that bacteria was wiped out in no time flat and after the second day I was back to normal.

While I was sick, I didn’t think of the bumper sticker. It was only when I was recovered and wondering at how strange an experience it had been that I remembered I’d been given a warning.

Although how exactly I was supposed to get Wear a facemask on the plane unless you want walking pneumonia, Kate from Pray for Kate I’ll never know.

Maybe obtuse warnings from the universe aren’t as useful as they could be. What I like about them is the sense that someone out there is rooting for you. Even if you don’t know what they’re trying to say, there’s a force that wants to help.

Or a force that wants to say, “I told you so” after the fact.

It’s nice to think the universe has a sense of humor, even when the joke’s at your expense.

So keep an eye out for those signs! They probably won’t be the Powerball numbers but inclusion in the ineffable isn’t such a bad prize at the end of the day.

 

But if you’re listening, I’d also really appreciate the Powerball numbers. Please?

On That Midnight Plane to Georgia

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by beneaththehat in Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Airport, Atlanta, tales of the traveling hat

On Wednesday I will be heading off to Atlanta for a few education conferences.  Not that I participate in them in any real way, that is the job of my travel companion.  I generally hear about all the details in the evening when the day’s work is done.  Every summer for the past four years I’ve been going to various cities in these United States for these conferences but this is my first time in Atlanta.

I have been to Atlanta before in a technical sense but I don’t think a lay over in an airport really counts as having been somewhere.  At most you’ve been to an airport.  And oh boy, have I been to a lot of airports.

I used to be crazy in love with airports.  They were always exciting because if you were going to an airport it meant you were leaving your existence as you knew it and venturing elsewhere. It was like cracking open a book but with more security.

Admittedly, some of the glow around airports has faded over the years.  I don’t dislike them but I do see them in a considerably less glamorous way.  They’re more like waypoints where you need to be able to take your shoes off and get your laptop out in a timely manner or everyone behind you is quietly resenting your existence.

Now that I’ve got that airport tangent out of the way, back to the point.  I’m going to a town I know very little about but it should be fun.  According to what I’ve heard about the weather there’s going to be a lot of storms while I’m there and if there’s anything I love it’s a good downpour.  Aside from the weather I have my eye on trying out a double bypass burger at The Vortex, mostly because instead of buns they use two grilled cheese sandwiches.  That is both insane and amazing.  Just the way my hat likes it.

….

No, I’m not blaming my bad decisions on my hat.  That would not be like me at all.

Ahem.

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