passenger in transit

I’ve been told that I was a year old the first time I got into a plane, but, of course, I don’t remember anything. I should have behaved relatively ok because nobody has a dark memory of some horrendous thing I did during that trip… and if they have one it’s a very well kept secret.

The first ‘important’ trip that I have any memory worth telling, was going to Argentina from Venezuela, when my parents decided that my mom, my sisters and myself should go to Buenos Aires to find a house to move there later. Due to one of those crazy ideas from my dad, we were going to move to the supposedly unknown South in a time where everybody who could move from Venezuela was going to the so called wonderful North.

The flight left at night and I spent that whole day playing outside. Now I understand that they let me do that so I wouldn’t disturb the preparations and I wouldn’t help with the stress. I said goodbye to my friends not like somebody who was leaving for 3 months to a country they didn’t know much about to be with a family I knew even less about, but like somebody who was leaving for a weekend at the beach. Ignorance is bliss.

Luckily, I can’t remember anything about the forms filling, customs, passports, etc which is a routine that I coordinate to perfection now, almost with my eyes closed, as I’m the one charge of doing it anytime we travel. In that occasion my mom was taking care of all of that, of all of us and of all her nerves. The movie on the plane was Rocky (I, II or II, my memory doesn’t go so far) and my mom decided I was too little to watch it… even though I have watched it already. It seems that when you are a kid on a plane you are smaller and you need to be more ‘controllable’. As I kept insisting on watching, because there’s nothing else to do on a plane and the screen was huge and right up front and I had no intentions to sleep, my mom decided to take my glasses away. Great success. I was (and still am) almost blind, so the movie was over for me. Moms can be very creative, really. But I still didn’t want to sleep and as that was my mom’s objective I felt that, in that particular battle, we were even.

Now, what my mom didn’t realize was that not only I couldn’t see the movie, but either could I see my food, so I ate with my nose on the tray. I couldn’t see the coke on my sisters little folding table when I tried to leave my chair to go to the restroom (little sisters travel in the middle seat, what did you think? That I was going to get the window or the aisle?), so the coke went flying away when I kicked my sister’s table and it spilled over my shoe, my sister and the woman in the seat across the hallway. It’s amazing the amount of liquid those little cups can handle. Sadly resigned, my mom gave me my glasses back and I fell asleep happily while Rocky was kicking somebody on the screen.

We arrived to Ezeiza and I’m not sure if my aunt and uncle and cousins were there, but I’m sure my grandmother was and not all of the suitcases were. From the baggage we brought… they lost half. And that’s how that odyssey started… my mom, the three of us (two with coke on their clothes and/or shoes), two lost suitcases, a ton of dollars in an envelope, as my mom traveled with all the cash to buy the house because the currency exchange was a nightmare in one of the countries (or both) and my grandma, the spoiler, waiting for us with chocolates in her purse.