Going with the Flow

As the old joke goes, we’re three thousand miles from the ocean, in California instead of New York. We were scheduled to fly from Burbank to JFK yesterday at noon. Before leaving our hotel, we checked the airline’s website, which reported that our flight would leave on schedule. By the time we arrived at the airport, however, our flight was listed as “delayed,” and by the time we reached the check-in counter, the flight had been cancelled. The first available flight is the red-eye on Sunday night, arriving in New York early Monday morning. The airline’s problem was not the snow in New York but the dispersion of the aircrews. The storm had put them in places from which they couldn’t reach Los Angeles in time.

We couldn’t return to our hotel, which was fully booked for the New Year’s festivities, and we were unable to rent another car from the agency to which we had returned our rental less than an hour before. Our son came to the rescue. He picked us up, loaded our heavy suitcases into his car, and took us to his home, where we will stay until Sunday night. In addition, we can use our daughter-in-law's car. She's in Israel right now attending her youngest sister, who gave birth to a daughter a few days ago.

This morning, I had to struggle to put our suitcases into our car’s trunk, and only with the help of my wife did I succeed. When we returned the car, I was unable to extract the suitcases, one of which we had jammed against the trunk’s lock. An attendant had to help me. And the driver of the shuttle van had to lift the suitcases into the bus and, when we had arrived at the airport, lift them down and place them on a luggage cart. My injured foot made it harder for me to lift the cases – I tried, without too much success, not to put pressure on it – but the main problem was my lack of upper body strength. Oh to be seventy again! But just as I could do nothing about the cancellation of the flight, I can’t do much about the decline in my strength. I try to retard the decline with strength training exercises, but I have to wait for my damaged foot to heal before I can resume them again.

I’m surprised my equanimity in all this, going with the flow rather than raging against the circumstances. But what good would it do me to fume? The Goddess Fortuna has been good to me up to now and raging against her might put me in her bad graces. Besides, she's really done us a favor. She's given us extra days with our descendants, and we won't be forced to climb over snowdrifts once we arrive in New York. By then, there should be a path through the pile of snow at the curb. It’s an ill wind, as they say.