Dept. of Transit: Some Notes from Heathrow

Some musings I recorded during a meal of haddock, chips and Guinness at Heathrow:

TRAVEL AT HEATHROW inevitably involves what feels like an inordinate amount of walking and transportation to some other region of the sprawling complex that is London's largest airport. This may very well be the result of the stress of travel as well as the fact that airport diagrams, like subway maps, are not drawn to scale, making very large distances appear to be easily negotiated.

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My waitress has checked on me twice in the past five minutes. Does the proximity of a particular space to another space that is transient in nature make the first space transient by association? Applied to my meal, am I expected to leave this restaurant, which is a rather warm and fairly inviting environment, more quickly and is the service to be more harried than it usually would be, because I am in an airport?

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This next month is going to be painful...this next week, too, though the distracting power of work might save me from the full brunt to the melancholic torrent that will no doubt flood my psyche in the coming days. its deluges recalling the tears shed before my departure; its winds redolent of the cool breeze that rippled through the air as I left Budapest, yet a hundred times stronger. O, the violence of raw memories.

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Can't quite place that woman's accent (the waitress)...cute though...

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The PA system is butchering Don McClean's one, and essentially only, hit song.

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Watching darts is like watching poker or bowling. What makes a sport worthy of popular attention, anyway? Who watches darts (besides those held captive in overpriced airport restaurants)?

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Beveled corners on the vinegar bottle. Hmmm...

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Mar-le-na! I just met a girl named Marlena (presumably: that's the name given on my bill.)

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I'm about to go to a country of loud people. A country where people tote their over-priced tri-band cellphones in hip holsters and who don't mind the fact that answering calls on wireless earpieces makes them look schizophrenic.

Dept. of Departures: Another D-Day

I OFFERED A countdown as I prepared to depart for Budapest in August of last year. Some seven months later, I find myself nearing another date of departure: that when I am scheduled to lug my baggage to Ferihegy, and board a BA flight bound for Heathrow, where, provided that my bags aren't lost in Terminal 5, I will change carriers and fly to Boston via American. I almost wrote that I would be going home via Heathrow, but using the word "home" doesn't sit that well with me at this moment. Budapest has been home for the past seven months and it is not without a sense of melancholy that I leave this home for another. Of course, I'm looking forward to seeing my family for the first time in what has been the longest stretch I have spent without their company. But I'm deeply saddened by having to leave here so many friends, so many to whom I've grown close over the past months, and so many others to whom I wish I could have grown closer.

D-4 H-4 M-2

Dept. of Outspoken Celebrities: From His Cold, Dead Hands

CHARLTON HESTON'S ACTING career made him an icon of Hollywood, with roles ranging from the Biblical, as Moses in "The Ten Commandments," to the modern, as a hard-boiled detective in "Touch of Evil," to the futuristic, as an astronaut in "Planet of the Apes."

Of course, as Tom Lehrer noted, show business and politics often go hand in hand, and, in that tradition, Heston's legacy is not only cinematic, but also political. Heston's allegiances varied over the years as were the causes which he supported: Heston supported Kennedy and Johnson in their Presidential bids, as well as Nixon and Reagan in theirs; he was a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement, though one who disapproved strongly of affirmative action; he opposed McCarthyism and the Vietnam War; he supported gun control legislation after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, but, some 30 years later, assumed the presidency of the NRA.

Heston certainly deserves to be remembered for his mark on Hollywood, as well as his political work for both conservative and progressive causes. But, as a progressive, I find his insistence that the Second Amendment entitles him, as a citizen, to keep his firearms until pried from his "cold, dead hands" detracts greatly from my memory of him. However, it is still with some sorrow that his death finds me. Indeed, the death of an apparently conflicted man makes for conflicted memories.

He was 84.

Dept. of Evenings Lost: A Brief Musing

MARCH 28, 2008
GÖDÖRKLUB, BUDAPEST

BEARING AN UNEATEN piece of cheesecake on a plate, a man wends his way toward the bar, slipping through the crowd of 20-somethings, some swaying to the the live music, others swaying on their own accord. Still others, having only just arrived, stand stolidly, peppered throughout the masses, sipping on their glasses of Dreher and Tokaji, waiting for the alcohol to percolate into their veins.