Kansas City Terminal

March 1999

Hays, Kansas

In March 1999, I performed the duties of the stay at home dad. Alex had returned the previous week to her native city of Sibiu to be with her father, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. Tristan and I had stayed behind only to await his passport, the photo of which prominently displayed my hand since he was too young to sit by himself on the stool at Kinko’s.

Have I ever mentioned that no place on earth can match Kansas for sunsets? The absolute flatness of the high plain frames the winter wheat sky so perfectly you will find yourself mumbling fire and turning back to the East for protection. When the sun alights upon the horizon you expect to feel the rumble of cosmic collision.

Kansas City International airport is a maze of prison-like terminals. And because this is Kansas, the original engineers must have designed these terminals to rely on that sun for light, because it is the darkest airport I’ve ever known. And the flights always leave at dusk.

The cancer had taken its pounds of flesh off his body, to the tune of a lifetime of atonement. When Alex departed, she spoke of her father with hope, the hope a daughter has for her father. An almost arrogant hope that the strongest man you’ve ever known will not be so easily defeated. Like my wife, he was a member of the Romanian national handball team, a tall, skinny man with hands like stone. Hands that once tore leather with each score would later cradle a bottle and a smoke almost nonstop for 30 years. He and my own father were the two drunkest men I’ve ever witnessed in person, though to his credit he was not violent. Unless you count the violence he rendered upon his own body through his addictions.

When I saw what remained of him on the hospital bed, I never spoke to Alex of her hope again. When you see for the first time just how deep set a man’s eyes truly lay within the pits of a skull, you understand where the limits of hope evaporate into resignation.

He died the week after I returned, without my wife and son, to the land of the most surprising sunsets you’ve almost certainly never seen. Neither Alex nor I had yet emerged from our own childhoods before we married. So the stress of losing her father and the stress of not having her with me in Kansas meant that the three months she stayed behind were the most difficult of our lives. After one phone call in May, we must have been resigned to going our own ways and starting over, because we didn’t say good-bye. If you’ve ever ended a phone call with ‘okay’ you know it’s not.

And here is where I talk about the beauty of the sunrise and how I looked to the East and became a man. How I stumbled across a photo and threw down my gauntlet and returned to win her back.

No. As I try to emphasize in every post, I have a lot more growth ahead of me than behind. She did come back, but not like this. The Kansan sunrise leaves nothing to the imagination. There’s no promise of light, no wonder, no anticipation, no blushing of the sky. The absolute flatness means the sun simply appears. It’s dark, and then suddenly it’s day. It’s the flick of a light switch as opposed to the smoldering of a fire. It reminds you of waking too early and shielding your eyes in discomfort.

This is how Alex came back to me. She simply appeared like a Kansas sunrise. On schedule. I picked her up at the darkest airport terminal that any engineer could ever hope to design.

March 2005

Seattle, Washington

She comes back to me on Saturday, but this time I’m picking her up in Seattle, where every sunrise is uncertain and mysterious. Mt. Rainier protects you from the emerging light for so long that you almost give up and resign yourself to another night in the dark. And when the sky turns red, it’s not the mild flush of your cheek’s first kiss, but the awakening of a volcano too long asleep. My road to the airport is hidden from this sunset by Douglas firs and hemlocks almost to the very end. I cannot get there fast enough, no matter how hard I try.

I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space, on such a timeless flight
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home