Benches

I spend a lot of time on benches. Sitting on benches, reading on benches, people watching on benches, twiddling my thumbs on benches. I'm good at benches. And the reason I'm good at benches is simple, persistent, and unavoidable. I'm always early. Always. I'm early in spite of myself. Last night, I deliberately left my apartment late, so that I would arrive at a dinner party about 5 minutes late. It's fashionable, right? I missed a tram on purpose, took the less direct bus route, and walked really really slowly. Not only did I get there at 7:58, it turned out the dinner was actually at 8:30 and not 8. Benches.

Today is a horrible day for travel. A strike and a snowstorm have been scheduled to ruin everything. Which is why I woke up at 5:15am, hopped in the taxi at 6am, arrived at the airport at 6:25am (in a light, warmish sort of drizzle), checked in for my flight at 6:35am, and began waiting at 6:42am. My flight is at 10:30am. Benches. Well, more accurately, a rickety table in one of those weirdly corporate airport "cafés" that smell kind of like polyester and slightly stale croissants. They have Wifi here (pronounced "weefee" à la français"), which is probably cheating. There's something much less impressive about waiting for three hours when you're plugged into the infamous time-suck of the web.

Remember when you were little, buckled in on long car rides to your grandparents or Florida or wherever families take 8 year olds? Remember all the stuff you'd bring? Books and notebooks and pens and pencils and, as the early 90s gave way to the (over)stimulation of the present day, gameboys and mini DVD players and those TV screens in cars. You needed to be prepared for everything and anything. The preparation approached a mathematical equation: the length of the car trip divided by the attention span of the child equals the amount of different things you needed to stuff into those little pouches on the back of the seats of the minivan. Having a sister helped sometimes. Card games are easier to play with two people, unless solitaire is your thing. It isn't mine.

But something happened a couple years ago. The need for stimulation dissipated. The number of things I shoved in my backpack or purse decreased to such a point where the backpack became unnecessary. Because all I bring is a book. Sometimes a journal. And, most of the time, I don't even pull it out. Plane rides and train rides and car rides have become an enforced period of nothingness. A time when I don't actually have to DO anything. I can just sit. And I welcome that. It's the perfect excuse. Sometimes I wonder if maybe my entrenched penchant for earliness is some sort of subconscious mechanism at work. Maybe I'm forcing myself to just sit. Do to nothing. To read nothing. To think nothing. Meditation by bench.

I have a solid 24 hours of travel ahead of me before I arrive at one of my favorite places in the world to be with some of my favorite people in the world. In 24 hours, I will be home. In the meantime, I will be nothing. And it's gonna be awesome.