Like Lemonade from Lemons

The children have been warned of the lurking danger outside the small school building and have quietly made their way out the side door. As they approach the calm street running along the front side of the building, the camera pulls back and frames the schoolhouse in an imposing, wide-angle shot. Suddenly the sound of running feet rat-a-tat-tat’s across the soundtrack, and the abrupt disturbance sends a swarm of black birds up into the air from behind the building. The horrific chase begins.

The scene I have just described is probably the most famous scene Alfred Hitchcock ever filmed for one of his movies, second only to the infamous shower scene from Psycho. The attack on the small seaside village of Bodega Bay by thousands of birds in Hitchcock’s The Birds to this day remains a stunning thrill ride and cinematic masterpiece. I wanted to begin this week’s post with this particular movie remembrance, because today I walked in front of that very same schoolhouse, and stood in roughly the same spot where I imagine Hitchcock must have stood and peered through his viewfinder, in order to frame what would become such a legendary movie image, roughly 47 years ago.

Now those of you who read my blog post last week know that I promised then to be sending my post forth into the blogosphere this week from Paris, France. And those of you who have seen The Birds know that the small seaside village of Bodega Bay isn’t located in France but resides approximately 65 miles north of San Francisco, California. And I am further certain that those of you who have not been living underneath a rock for the past week know that the entire continent of Europe has been all but unreachable since last Thursday due to the April 14 eruption of Mount Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. All of this is to say rather verbosely that this post is not in fact coming to you this week from France. Alas!

When Elaine and I began preparation for our trip to France nearly a year ago (longer if you take into consideration the fact that we both promised each other sometime back in 2006 a vacation somewhere in Europe once school was completely finished for us both), we believed we had thought of everything. Probably not a surprise that volcano eruption was not on our list of possible deal breakers. At any rate, this past Friday, we caught our flight from Raleigh/Durham, and made the first leg of the journey to our two-hour layover in Cincinnati. We were told by the airport official who checked us in that if they were going to cancel our flight to France, they would have already done so at that point. Phew! What a relief! So we boarded, and we flew. The second, and I mean the second, we stepped off the plane in Ohio we were informed that all flights to and from Europe had been canceled, and that the airspace over the majority of the continent had been completely shut down indefinitely.

Shock. Disbelief. Heartbreak. All of our planning, all of our hoping, all of our dreaming gone just like that. In less than a flash, France was snatched from us. We were pointed in the direction of a rather daunting, single-file line leading up to a service counter, where three airport workers sat and slowly attempted to help everyone who had arrived in Cincinnati that day with every intention of flying on to somewhere in Europe. The line crept. As Elaine and I stood looking wide-eyed at each other, we began to hear the familiar and relatable stories of the others in line with us and began to share in our collective explosion of bad luck. A man in the States for kidney surgery trying to get back to his family in the Ukraine. A boy trying to reach a job interview in Paris so that he could move back to France. People stranded. People confused. People who just wanted to go home. Elaine’s and my predicament, however, left us with an interesting and unique set of choices. We could either refund our tickets to France, and have Delta fly us back to North Carolina and disappointment, or we could on-the-spot decide to salvage our vacation (time that we both already had off from work) and resolve to travel some place else.

And so we changed our tickets over to a later flight that evening leaving for San Francisco. Rather than wallow in our misfortune, we decided to make the most of our planned time off, a country full of things we both have wanted to see and do, and a unique situation that afforded us, surprisingly, a great deal of flexibility. We spent two days in San Francisco, and then drove up to Sonoma wine country, where we have been hopping from vineyard to vineyard, sampling some of this country’s best wines. Tomorrow we leave for Monterey and Carmel.

Now I don’t want to give you a false sense of heroics and stiff upper-lippery from this story. There have been occasions during our journey, where one of us, either Elaine or myself, has looked at the other and, with slightly glassy eyes, made the comment that, if things had gone as planned, at that moment we should have been strolling the grounds where Louis XIV once outrivaled extravagance at the Palace of Versailles. We have not always managed the level of flawlessness that I would like to think we are capable of when it comes to rolling with the punches and being good sports about life’s little curveballs. There have been times when we flat out just wish Paris had worked out for us.

However, there was a moment in San Francisco, when we were dining at a terrific seafood restaurant at the end of Pier 39, that I would like to tell you about. We were sitting at our table; I sipping a glass of very fine pinot noir and Elaine nibbling at a mouth-watering plate of Dungeness crab pasta, Alcatraz perfectly visible out a window overlooking San Francisco Bay to our right, the sun setting just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge to our left. I took a sip of my wonderfully aged red, and in that moment, with that remarkable view before me and my favorite person beside me, I think I stopped aching for Paris and decided to let San Francisco in.

Paris was a dream for us, and now it’s our dream deferred. As with all dreams, the possibilities remain endless and our imaginations are free to continue to run wild. One day we will get the opportunity to make that dream come true again. But as it stands now, we may not have Paris, but we’ll always have San Francisco and Sonoma wine country.

Until next week, here is my hope that we all find out Shangri-La. Good night.