Praying in the City of Angels
“Please turn off all electronic devices,” she said as the plane started to back away from the gate. While shoving my iPhone into my pocket, the guy in the seat next to me touched his right hand to his forehead, then his chest, then waved it toward each shoulder. The Sign of the Cross. I was flying to Los Angelos — the City of Angels. Somehow, it made sense. Two minutes later, out on the tarmac, the pilot told us we faced a 20-minute delay as we waited for planes in front of us to take off. We pulled into a long line of passenger jets, stopped, and waited. Pray a little harder, would ya, buddy?
I didn’t see a single angel for the next two days. Los Angelos is a cesspool of artificiality. According to my dining-mate, a woman at the martini bar we visited for dinner on the first night said, “I don’t want him. He’s just a V.P. He couldn’t make more than $500,000 a year.” And in this bar full of unusually tall, thin, polished women, she wasn’t even the tallest, thinnest, or most polished. The hotel room’s only electrical outlet was dead-center behind an oversized headboard and its shower, determined to make me late, took 15 minutes to get hot. The cab drivers bobbed and weaved, hellbent on inducing motion sickness. The food trucks, apparently united in committing a citywide practical joke, offered the messiest of foods, but not a single napkin. The flight home was delayed, at first by an hour, then in small, teasing increments up to an hour and a half. A huge number of other flights were delayed, and airport staff called out new gate numbers for twenty or so flights just in the time I sat at mine waiting for a plane to show up. Every few minutes, a swarm of people would get up, leave a gate, move to a new one, and plop down again. First-world problems, one and all, but when you travel as part of your profession, it’s the little things that remind you that home is better.
On the plane, filled to capacity by standby passengers all vying for their chance to get back to somewhere, the fight attendant’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Please turn off all electronic devices,” she said. And the guy next to me touched his right hand to his forehead, then his chest, then waved it toward each shoulder.
The guy on the first flight was praying for a smooth trip to L.A. The guy on the second flight? He was just happy to get the hell out of there.
