Amber (Well, Greenish) Waves of Grain

In the end, it was the most painfree trip we'd taken during our year abroad. No Heathrow Terminal 5 luggage roulette, like with Rome. No cattle-call RyanAir boarding hell, like with Dublin. No last-minute snag with the dog's crate, like when we'd moved to England in the first place. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became Oxford like our leaving of it.

We'd been fretting over our luggage--two checked cases each, stuffed to bursting, weighed with a borrowed scale--but each was under the limit. If you were standing near the British Air baggage check-in yesterday morning and saw a family of four high-fiving each other after each suit case was hefted onto the scale, that was us. The flight was a bit bumpy but BA provides a nice U.S. re-entry service: just watch "Semi-Pro" and "The Simpsons" on the little video screen and you're re-acclimated to the States.

Our driver was waiting for us at Dulles. I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of seeing my name in Magic-Marker on a clipboard. "Why yes, I'm John Kelly." Then to BA cargo where, after 14 hours in his crate, Charlie the dog was set free, no worse for wear. He seemed to take special pleasure in that first long pee on American soil.

We climbed back into the van and proceeded to...wait in a traffic jam. That's when I truly knew we were back in Washington, a place where any trip can take anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours. But I wasn't in any hurry. It was costing me the same no matter how long the ride. And I felt no sympathy for the driver, who said he had to pick up another customer in Gaithersburg at 4 p.m. Let's see, our plane was scheduled to land at 1:30, we had to clear Customs and pick up a dog, then drive around the Beltway to Silver Spring? And he thought he could get to Gaithersburg by 4? The fool!

In the end, we arrived home at 3:59 and I wished the driver luck with his ion propulsion-drive system.

After 10 months on Osberton Road our Amurican house seemed huge. Huge but welcoming. Our tenants, Gordon and Leslie, had left it in just as good shape as we'd left our Oxford house. The only glitch was that the lawn service we'd contacted hadn't mowed since Gordon and Leslie moved out a month ago. The front yard was a wonderful ocean of grass, like something from the prairie.


I don't even know where to start with cutting it. I think I may need a scythe. Or some sheep.

Sky Prince: Something in the Air

First off, a very sincere welcome to anyone who has arrived here courtesy of my essay in today's Guardian. It's about how some people find my blog, usually people who aren't looking for it, but for something a bit more, um, interesting. Like most people with web pages I have a little bit of software that shows me how many people are visiting. (I use one called StatCounter but there are others. [Any recommendations on a better one?]) Rest assured that it doesn't tell me who you are. Your identity is safe.

Now to Britain's royal family. I confess that I have trouble keeping England's princes separate. Which one is the heir to the throne? William? Henry? Wait, there isn't a Henry. It's Harry. Harry?

Both brothers have something to do with the Army, in a stage-managed, Potemkin-village sort of way. But one turns out to also be in the Air Force, or at least to have gotten his wings from the RAF.

That would be William, who recently earned his pilot's wings after some sort of crash course in flying ("crash course"; that's probably not the best choice of words). And now Prince William has been criticized for using his newfound ability to fly a helicopter to his cousin's bachelor party. Training, said the RAF. A waste of 15,000 pounds, said critics.

The episode made me think of my own dodgy flights courtesy of the Air Force. Well, not totally dodgy. My dad was in the U.S. Air Force and as a dependent I was able to fly "space A": space available. Sometimes when I went from one divorced parent to the other it was on an Air Force passenger plane. (The best flight was when Dad did an exchange tour with the Royal Air Force and I jetted from England to the U.S. on an RAF VC-10.)

Then there was the time after college when my dad was the commander of a U.S. base in Germany. I had just graduated from college and was kicking around Europe, planning on being the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. (I must look into why that never happened.) I went from Germany to France and then to England, where I pitched up at the Camberwell flat of my friend Adrian. It was there that I ran out of money and decided I had to go back home and start my adult life. The problem was, half my luggage was back in Germany. How would we be reunited?

As there was a USAF jet flying from Germany to RAF Alconbury, Dad had my suitcase put aboard. He said it was an F-4. Can that really have been true? My Samsonite in a Phantom, the workhorse of the Vietnam War? I like to think of it nestled in the nose or strapped to a wing. In any event, Adrian and I went to pick it up. We think of tight security as a post-9/11 artifact, but bases were guarded just as strictly then. I had my Air Force dependent ID card with me and pulled it out as we drove up to the gate. Oddly, the guards were in combat uniforms, with machine guns slung over their shoulders. A yellow flag hung from a stanchion on the gate house. There was some sort of war game exercise going on, explaining the extreme readiness.

The guard ordered us to stop and I handed over my ID. Just then, a phone rang. The guard answered it. "Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. Okay," he said. He took the yellow flag out of its holder and replaced it with a red flag. "Did we just die?" Adrian asked as the guard returned my ID and waved us through. Perhaps on some war planner's graph paper a Soviet bomb had just obliterated Alconbury.

We drove to a little office attached to a hanger and there was my suitcase, specially delivered by the U.S. Air Force, faster even than Fed Ex could have brought it. I think because of that, I don't begrudge William his little helicopter trip.