In December of 2019 our extended family--my parents, my sisters, our husbands and our children--gathered in Mexico to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. It was a gala occasion, a week of being together and enjoying sea, sand, and sunshine. When I hugged my parents goodbye it was with the promise that I would return to see them in a few month. March 12th.
I did not. Essential travel only. We had some of that in our family and managed it as safely as possible, and stayed well. Seeing my parents could wait, or so I hoped.
Nearly nineteen viral months after that farewell, I returned. There had been several 'almosts' but each time something--family issues, climbing case counts, imminence of vaccination, confused government edicts, my previously-untapped ability to not travel--served to postpone the making of plans. How to measure the essence of 'essential'? I watched others travel, by car, by plane, within countries, across borders. They managed it.
Then came my mother's 90th birthday, earlier this month. It felt essential to be there. Essential, and possible to manage safely.
And lo, it was possible. We did manage it. We jumped through numerous hoops and surmounted a variety of hurdles. In fact, as we sneaked peaks at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it occurred to me that international air travel could almost be entered as a new Olympic event.
We all got there, my whole family along with elder son's plus-one. We arrived in Woodland Hills, California two by two: my daughter and I went first. In the ever-changing landscape of government rules and edicts about crossing borders, information was as difficult to pin down as liquid mercury.
The Air Canada website said we had to have a PCR test (that's the expensive one). The US immigration website said "PCR or antigen". Essential travel only, said a newspaper article. "US/Canada Border Re-Opening," Twitter chirped. "No one even asked me why I was going," reported someone who had recently driven across the Peace Bridge into Buffalo. Could my husband join me (non-American, holder of a British passport and Canadian permanent resident card)? Good question. Fully vaccinated--but with Astra Zeneca? Multiple types of vaccine? Shrug. I called Air Canada. No one at home to answer the phone.
I turned to friends--mostly Americans--for their experiences. "How was it for you?" I asked several who had made the experiment at various points. Fine, they all said, but I could find no one doing what we were trying: flying rather than driving, a mixed bag of Americans and non-Americans, in a month without an R in it. So many variables. So many sources of data. So much disagreement. A lot of shrugging.
So, full of trepidation, armed with certificates of vaccination and negative test results (antigen; the pharmacy said that's what everyone else was having, whoever and wherever those everyones were now), daughter and I, in the vanguard of our family expedition, trekked to the airport. My jittering nerves could have powered a small country.
We sailed through security and approached Passport Control at Toronto's Pearson Airport, where US Immigration and Customs do their thing. The uniformed agent smiled at us--at least, his eyes did, above his mask. He waved us through. Welcome home, he seemed to say. We boarded the plane and found our seats, near the back where not many people had to pass by. For a long while the aisle seat in our row remained empty and I allowed myself to hope but then a young man, a perfectly decent and clean one, sat next to us. I was glad my mask (KN95, fitting snugly, thank you very much) covered my inadvertent glare. I was not glad, however, to see that his mask rested below his nose.
"Please, can you put your mask on fully?" I asked.
"Of course. Sorry." He complied. "Are you vaccinated?"
"I am, but we still need masks on."
"Of course," he nodded. "What vaccine?"
I wanted not to be facing this nice young man, not be chatting with him, not, of all things, to be discussing vaccination. "Astra Zeneca." It felt like a confession and I kicked myself for getting drawn in this way. I took the offensive. "What about you? Are you fully vaccinated?"
"Getting there," he said vaguely and alarmingly, his mask slipping down a little. What? I thought, drawing as far away from him as I possibly could. "What do you think about this mixing of vaccines?" he asked me.
"I think it's fine," I stuttered. "Whatever vaccine you can get, you should take."
He shook his head, murmured something in a tone of doubt, and took a phone call, pulling his mask up over his nose again. Daughter and I exchanged glances. The man disconnected and waved his phone in front of me. "And what do you think of this?" he asked me. I saw a screen full of brightly colored stiletto-heeled shoes.
"Uh. Shoes," I replied, stupidly.
"Not the shoes," he said with a touch of impatience. "Look. It's a shoe organizer." Indeed it was. "It's my product," he added. I saw a transparent acrylic board with narrow holes along its width and length; a pencil-thin high heel had been inserted into each one. It was in a way beautiful, like a Mondrian painting, and also the most useless object I could imagine. I surrendered to the inevitable. I would have to speak truth to Y-chromosome.
"Look," I said. "I'm pretty nervous about this trip. I don't think I can have this conversation any more. Sorry."
"I'm making you uncomfortable," he said. "I'll move to another seat."
Instant guilt. "Oh, no, you don't have to do that. I just can't make small talk right now." The guilt was compounded by the fact that the man and I belonged to different visible ethnicities. "Please don't move because of me."
But he did move. As I saw a little later he had found a seat with no neighbor where he could sprawl his not-fully-vaccinated self in comfort. Meanwhile, daughter and I had our row to ourselves now and watched Gilmore Girls in masked semi-privacy. Win-win (except for the guilt).
Time passes quickly when you are watching trashy sitcoms with your teenage daughter, and we landed without incident--and after a car-service ride across the Santa Monica Mountains, I was reunited at last with my parents. Calloo, callay!
More hurdles however remained. We were reunited, true, and under the same roof--but still physically distanced and masked for three awkward days. We stayed outdoors as much as possible. Antigen self-testing kits were procured from the drugstore and after 72 hours we hooked up our phones to our nasal passages by means of swabs and an app, and got the all-clear. At last: hugs! Touch! Dinner indoors!
The other two pairs in our party arrived: first, elder son and girlfriend coming from Vancouver, followed two days later by husband and younger son; there was some truck with US immigration in one case, successfully surmounted, and a flight delay for the other pair. More masking, more separating, more testing, and then, blissfully, reunion. Hugging.
The visit was amazing. I am not sure I have ever appreciated a trip 'home' as much as this one. Maybe my first return to LA after leaving for university decades (and decades) ago had a similar emotional impact. I marveled that everything was still the same--road signs, stores, office buildings--as my mother drove me home from Hollywood-Burbank airport. "You really should have achieved object permanence by now," I recall my mother saying with a slight frown.
This visit, it was people, rather than things, that I marveled to see again. I woke up every morning with an urge to pinch myself just so as to believe I was really truly there, in my childhood bedroom, my parents next door, my family around me. Over the course of almost 4 weeks, I saw my sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law and some cousins and friends. I met in real life a new 'pandemic pal' who to me had only ever been the size of a tiny Zoom tile.
With my family I swam and hiked and beachcombed and went running and rode bikes and clambered in caves and visited Hollywood's Walk of Fame for the first time in decades. We went to Muscle Beach. Some of us rambled around the Getty Center. We took silly photos. We swam in the sea and in swimming pools. Daughter took a Red Cross lifesaving course and made her own new friends. Son's girlfriend and niece's boyfriend joined in the family events and seem to have survived unscathed--kudos to them! Younger son had some driving lessons with his grandfather.
I feasted my eyes on the landscape of the southwest, the jagged coastal range, the crumbly inland one, the ocean, the canyons, the cactus and the palms. The dry scents of sage and pine and eucalyptus and juniper and sandstone dust. The stunning western sunsets over ocean and chaparral.
Our homeward travel involved more paperwork, more testing (and more expensive testing), and of course more packing. But it all worked in the end. And now we are back in our home(s), getting ready for our next chapters.
Glut of miscellaneous photos:
