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Sunday, February 11, 2007

I recall reading about United's PS offering a while ago, thinking it could be very beneficial to me even though my flying between New York and LA had become less frequent, and hoping the service was better than its third-rate promotional web site might lead one to believe. By allocating a much higher percentage of seats to first and business classes, and by increasing the legroom of the economy class three full inches (a change paradigm-shattering enough to warrant a renaming to "Economy Plus") they hoped to evoke bygone associations of air travel with style and superiority, and carve out the bicoastal frequent-flyer niche as an oasis of premium pricing amidst the commodified desertification of discount operators. I will save my thoughts on the prospects of this project, and the future of United and its major carrier ilk, for another time, but suffice it to say air travelers already paying a premium for those glorious extra three inches will have to hold their breath for Economy DoublePlus if they wish to receive a sandwich without paying an extra $5.

Even those passengers receiving full complementary meals in UnitedFirst, however, were not immune to some LAX gate congestion last Sunday as I sat far behind them, less concerned with United's business model than finding any last-minute flight available. As we waited on the tarmac for nearly an hour, the first officer kindly informed us of the outcome of the Super Bowl that had been played mid-flight, and apologized repeatedly for the delay. I mostly stared out the window. Depending on which runway I land on at LAX, I can see the office building at which my father worked for several years abutting, thanks to its company's origins as a grandchild of Howard Hughes, the edge of the airport alongside other Hughes progeny and assorted other defense contractors. This flight had indeed landed on the right side, and my eyes lingered for a while on that building as I waited, for nearly an hour. Corporate apples apparently don't tend to fall far from the tree.

So it goes for people too. My paternal grandparents strongly influenced my early perception of air travel. Though it was past the true heyday of regal airline treatment, they still had the air of two swinging jet-set empty nesters who had amassed passports full of stamps and filled their own Frank Lloyd Wright-esque museum house in the hills with exotic souvenirs and collectables displayed in several rooms forbidden to children (for no racier reason than the desire to keep everything in its proper condition, avoiding finger and footprints). Of course, no trip came without its trinket for the grandchildren - a shirt from the QE2 or tie-tack from Provence - and while they may have lived a geographically progressive lifestyle they were unabashedly devoted to their homeland, and more politically conservative than their left-leaning grandson would sometimes care to admit. Thus I saw them as freewheeling and worldly but still wholesomely grandparental.

This dichotomy makes perfect sense given their background. First-generation Americans whose parents had been lured by the Great Dream only to be abandoned by it as they raised children during the Great Depression, they were reared to respect the precious precariousness of a day's earnings and inculcated with a zealous reverence for familial ties. Too poor to have their honeymoon more than a couple of hours' drive down the California coast, they raced the sunset to Newport Beach on their wedding day to escape arrest - headlights and streetlamps were forbidden lest the potential WWII Japanese nighttime bombers be given any visual indication that they had reached US coastline. As the post-war economic boom brought prosperity to the land, and my grandfather's prescient bet that employer-provided group insurance was the wave of the future channeled some of that prosperity into their pockets, my grandparents began to cautiously explore the wide world that poverty had previously made so narrow. Never though, did they outgrow the traits that were either forged by or a guiding light through those very lean years: modesty, self-reliance, an amazement at the mundane, and devotion to family.

I refuse to feel guilty for being born in the pampered corner of the world my grandparents helped to bring about. Having no apocalyptic generational crisis around which to rally and from which to industriously construct a new future is no fault of mine or my peers. I also steadfastly refuse to accept that the "greatest generation" was a generation sui generis; to do so would be to take a very tiny slice of history as the whole, and the more prosaic explanation for that moniker might be that Tom Brokaw can sell more books using a superlative title instead of "More Than Likely One of a Baker's Dozen of Greatest Generations" (it is a moot point anyway, the debate will be settled soon when US News and World Report publishes the 2007 edition of their Greatest Generation Rankings). But just because I am not guilty does not mean I am not grateful. My refusals do not mitigate in the slightest the unbounded respect I have for their response to those predicaments. My very existence rides on their having risen to meet and best the crises as they did.

So at the forefront of my grandmother's mind was that crisis-honed sense of family devotion that her final words, uttered roughly as I sat on a tarmac waiting for a receptive gate, were: "I love everybody." The deliberateness and forcefulness with which she said this suggested she was quite aware of her own approaching fate, a fate I was 45 minutes too tardy to witness.

I have been to too many funerals for my taste over the past several years, but I had not yet been present at a deathbed, nor gripped a still-warm corpse's arm that used to feed me oatmeal, until Sunday. I had also not experienced the tragicomedy of grieving over a dead body as the room's demented and medicated other occupant pleaded for me to change her bedpan, but that will hopefully be an isolated event.

My love for my grandmother is obviously more directed and intense than my love for her generation as a whole, and certainly extends beyond my (also directed and intense) love for her and my grandfather as a unit. She outlived the Depression and World War II true, but also her pal Reagan and my goatee. She alchemized perfect strangers into dear friends almost by eye contact. She made it a point to know how to ask anyone she might speak to how they were doing in their native tongue. And she spent every single day for six and a half years, when she was physically capable and not on a rare excursion out of town, at the side of her stroke-addled, semi-conscious husband in his sub-acute long-term care facility. It is, I think, better that she departed first, for the pain of losing a companion of 64 years is incomprehensible, and better handled by the uncomprehending.

I am straying now into the unabated praise of a eulogy and that is not my intent, evidence to the contrary. I will conclude though in true eulogistic fashion by returning to her capacity, in my experience bottomless, to make her family feel loved. A few hours before I took that tardy flight I telephoned her at the hospital and, as she could barely speak, rambled on about how I was doing, mentioning that I was getting over a nasty cold. Her response, the last thing she said to me personally and her only words during the call, was a labored, nearly-breathless "feel better." I had a cold. She was dying. She was more concerned about the former.

Posted by morland @ 06:34 PM

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