October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

Sitting in the new American Airlines departure lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday morning May 21st 2007 at about 10:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, the only reminder my wife IM and I have that this is New York is a food kiosk called the Brooklyn Deli across the way from us. We could be in any airport in any large city anywhere in the world. I have been in several over the past few months—Ben-Gurion International outside Tel Aviv, Chiang Kai-Shek outside Taipei, Pudong International Airport outside Shanghai, and Narita outside of Tokyo—where all my outbound and inbound Asian flights connected. These giant gateways have a sameness to them that seeks to sooth the travelers’ anxiety over being displaced and in limbo between home and their final destination. Airports are also time portals where the traveler leaves the routine of Eastern Standard Time, in our case, and returns to the far more familiar realm of Pacific Standard Time. We’re all time travelers, us humans. Our lives move from one second to another, one minute to another, and so on from conception to extinction, each of us marking time in our geographic region. The airplane is the magic conveyance that allows us to jump from one region to another to experience life as someone far removed from our time zone.

As each second, minute, hour, and day passes we leave who we were in that past time behind. You can see your bygone selves and the state of the world around them in the still and moving pictures we make of those departed seconds. Four days in the Big Apple have zoomed by and all that remains are pictures and the credit card receipts documenting what we did while we were here. They are the only proof to ourselves and anyone else that we actually spent time in this big city. Furthermore, how much of what we believe happened actually happened and how much has our memory been embellished by what we want to believe the experience to have been.

About 25 years ago, I struggled to stay awake on a summer evening in 1982 during Zoe Caldwell’s performance of Medea on Broadway with Mitch Ryan playing Jason at the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street. I knew that the play featured Dame Judith Anderson as Nurse; but learned afterwards that the director Robert Whitehead had directed a younger Dame Anderson as Medea in a landmark 1947 production; and that both this and the earlier production were based on the play by American poet Robinson Jeffers, who adapted Euripides’s work for the modern stage. All those associated with the production now well along in age or deceased—Dame Anderson passed away in 1992 at the ripe old age of 94; Robert Whitehead lived another ten years dying in 2002 at the age of 86. I had inadvertently been privy to a once-in-a-lifetime event and learned about it after the fact. The realization made the experience of far greater import now than it had been at the time of the performance. In my older age, I realize that too many experiences of my life were far more enjoyable on reflection than when they occurred.

Our outbound flight from San Francisco International on Thursday May 17, 2007 at 11:30 AM, lasted around five and a half hours. All of that time I spent curled up in a coach class window seat in row 34 on the port side of the Boeing 767 aircraft wishing the time would past faster. I disembarked that many hours older, having flown 2586 miles from one side of the country to another, viewing below me, when I glanced out my window and cloud cover permitting, the landscape of the United States. For a matter of seconds I saw the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the sprawl of Chicago, the ribbon of the Mississippi, some of it I recognized, some of it I guessed at. I could no longer hold onto the moments we passed over Chicago than I could grab the seconds of time that it is taking for me to write these words. Pictures and written records documenting our movements through time are our only proof of what we’ve done.

I’ve always collected receipts, not methodically, but folded and crammed into my wallet: receipts for cash purchases because I can’t bring myself to throw them away and they explain why I have paper where greenbacks used to be; credit card receipts to refresh my memory about something I’ve bought but don’t remember what when I see the statement at the end of the month; and more recently ATM receipts—I’m given the option to take cash without one but I always demand to have it—because I typically don’t record the withdrawal in my checkbook until much later. We live in a world driven by the acquisition and disposal of money. The system of finance that regulates our lives in all the advanced nations is analogous to water in nature.

Where water is in abundance, lush natural growth occurs. In all monetary societies, where an excess of wealth accumulates, you see the extravagant development in places like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, and the list goes on. Shinning, glass, steel, and concrete skyscrapers shoot up like stands of giant sequoias: every bit of the development documented in the form of financial transactions, once recorded on paper but in the 21st century in the form of binary data stored on hard drives, magnetic tape, and optical media in a multitude of storage farms scattered throughout the world. There is a record of everything everyone does in our advanced society. I want to recount the past four days through the receipts I’ve stashed away in my wallet. Tomorrow, we’ll start with receipt #1.