A tourist’s outlook turns everyday views to exotic
In 1941, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia announced a plan to relieve the congestion at what would become LaGuardia Airport in New York. They converted some swampland at the edge of the city, in Jamaica, Queens, into what was intended to be the world’s largest airport: Idlewild. On Dec. 24, 1963, six weeks after the assassination of the president, it was renamed John F. Kennedy Airport.
American Telephone and Telegraph (“Ma Bell”) maintained a building there, and my father, Hap, worked there for years.
Our home on Sutter Avenue was so close to the landing fields that when the big jets took off on either of the two northern runways, the plates in the china cabinet shook. The statuette of St. Jude rattled, though it never broke (well, until 40 years later, when my then-infant son Zane played with it as a ninja saint). But still, JFK was a mystery that my father came and went from.
My mother, Nurse Vivian, did not get her driver’s license until the late 1960s. It was the way of that time. Grandma Sadie did not drive. Nor did Grandaunt Beatrice. My Aunt Mildred was the only woman in the family who ever had a permit, but she crashed the car into a stoop on the way back from the DMV and never got behind the wheel again. But when the time came that my father had to leave the family at the summer camp in Yaphank with a two-mile walk to the convenience store, Nurse Vivian decided it was time for her to drive the big red Chevrolet station wagon.
Around the corner, Frank Cadden died young, leaving his wife Sally a widow to raise three boys. Nurse Vivian practiced her new driving skills with Sally, taking her to the grocery store and wherever else she needed.
That summer, Sally’s sister Mary flew in from Ireland to visit, only the second person in her family ever to ride in an airplane. Hap was at work, so my mother offered to pick Mary up.
Nurse Vivian found the TWA terminal right away. It was in the shape of a glass bird. Mary cleared customs and we got into the station wagon, with just one newly minted driver’s license among the four of us.
There were a lot of roads, so many that the exit to the Van Wyck Expressway was neither intuitive nor obvious. Nurse Vivian drove in loops for more than an hour, and each time we passed that crystal avian, Mary said in her brogue, “’Tis lovely.” Likewise the traffic control tower: “’Tis lovely.”
At last, we reached the Belt Parkway and Mary said, “’Tis lovely.” As was the Airport City Diner. As were the row houses with the sycamore trees in front. This woman, who had never been more than 40 miles from her farm, found all the mundane sights of the bottom corner of Queens to be pleasing to the eye. What to us was commonplace to her was exotic.
For the rest of my mother’s driving career, this was our thing. Whenever we got ourselves good and lost on the back roads of Long Island, she would pull over to the curb and we’d say, “’Tis lovely.” Then she would say a prayer to St. Jude, and we’d find our way home.
We never saw Mary again after her vacation. But lately I’ve tried to lean in toward beauty. A year ago this month, when Brian and I flew into Mary’s home country, I thought “’Tis lovely.” Thankfully, it did not take us quite so long to find our way out of Aerfort Bhaile Atha Cliath: Dublin Airport.
On our return home, after almost two weeks in Europe, we flew to SFO, an airport 14 years older than JFK. There was a minor air traffic kerfuffle, and so the pilot circled once around the city before landing. From 20,000 feet or so, I looked at Frank as I had first seen it 33 years ago. As Mary would have seen it. This little town on the edge of a peninsula is indeed beautiful, with pyramids and crosses sticking up into the sky, and Sutro Tower hovering like a frigate above the clouds.
Since we’ve returned, I’ve tried to remember the tourist I was in 1989. Despite all the politics and doom loops, I can look around at the dome of City Hall or the La Grande Water Tower or even the oncology ward at UCSF and whether we are lost or whether we are found, I say, “’Tis lovely.”
Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s book “Secrets of the Blue Bungalow” (Fearless Books, $25) is available at fearlessbooks.com and area bookstores. He will read from the book at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, March 30, at Reasonable Books in Lafayette. Reservation required by calling 925-385-3026.