Airports can be demanding spaces, crammed with scurrying folks who either have not enough time or too much of it. I found myself in the latter category in the St. Louis airport in October 2023, heading back home to Boston from a book reading in Iowa for my recently published novel Walking on Fire, set in Greece in the mid-seventies. There were only a few sips remaining of my Starbucks oat milk latte as I studied the tarmac with planes coming and going, watching figures rush about. Suddenly, I was ambushed by a memory sending me back almost fifty years to May 1974, to a time when coffee was weak and only came in one Styrofoam cup version.
At that time, five decades earlier, the entrances to planes were directly from the tarmac. I remember mounting an outdoor metal stairway attached to a loudly vibrating plane on this same black runway. With every pull on the handrail and each foot on shaking steps, I was leaving behind the airport, St. Louis, and a chance for a relationship with my hippie doctor boyfriend Wesley. The future was hiding the fact this was the last time I would ever see him.
Wesley and I had met the previous year in Colorado Springs at a bar during an after-work happy hour. I moved there to work as a speech pathologist, running away from a failed two-year marriage to a Texas college boyfriend. Bruised by rejection and unsure how to navigate life as a single person, I was living through a tormented time. Wesley was finishing his Army active duty as an emergency room physician at Fort Carson, and he was unlike anyone I’d known before. I was smitten by this man with small circular-framed glasses, frayed jeans and flannel shirts. He slicked back his long, dark curls with Dippity-Do for full dress uniform inspections at the Army base. Wesley had a clipped midwestern accent from his native Detroit and a notion that wearing underwear was unnecessary. He was rarely without marijuana, which we smoked using a scissor-like hemostatic clamp from the hospital as a roach clip, making it a point to never attach the joint in the exact same way. “Routine” seemed to be as much his enemy as the regimented Army culture. Our weed-infused conversations created a world of kaleidoscopic revelations. I fell hard. Very hard.
I loved the way Wesley looked at life. He paid particular attention to waiters and waitresses, janitors and caretakers, full of admiration for those who handled their service jobs with care and gusto. And he always studied people’s shoes to see what stories they told. As a physician, he noticed if there was an asymmetry of wear or more weight pressing down on the back of shoes. As an observer of human nature, he looked to see if the shoes were polished or scuffed, if the laces were tied tautly or not at all.
When his army obligation ended in January, Wesley moved back to Detroit, hinting in our phone calls of my joining him there. In the bedroom of my apartment in the shadow of Pike’s Peak, my finger would snake into the curls of the telephone cord with excitement each time he brought up the topic of moving in together.
I visited Wesley in Detroit in March. One midnight we ventured to a downtown restaurant and ordered hot dogs, a local favorite. Rather than sitting idly and waiting for a meal to be served, Wesley narrated the scene of wieners rotating on the grill to perfection, the buns being slathered with butter and toasted, the sauerkraut arranged, the crisp French fries popped into place. He pointed to the cook’s one last trip with a dishtowel around the edge of the plate, cleaning it up for the final presentation. The choreography of a simple meal became a performance to behold, something I would have missed had it not been for Wesley. Over the few days of my visit, the suggestion of my moving to Detroit stayed in the background. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in my nature in my nascent days of feminism to broach the topic. I held back.
In May he invited me to St. Louis, midway between Michigan and Colorado, for the wedding of a med school friend. At a Friday night pre-wedding gathering, I would have preferred sticking close beside my long-distance boyfriend. Instead, we followed the pattern he’d encouraged at parties—seeing who we could meet separately then sharing what we’d learned afterward in bed after lovemaking. I recognized Wesley’s plan as another independence-building activity. Although I appreciated his attempts to push me out onto a limb, give me a nudge, and encourage me to fly, deep down I would have preferred to build a nest.
In the taxi on the way to the wedding Saturday afternoon, Wesley stroked my bare shoulders exposed by the halter top of the floor-length floral patterned dress that was perfect for a garden wedding. We canoodled in the backseat before straightening ourselves to be presentable for the formal event.
“How much time do you have?” the taxi driver inquired of our schedule as we sped through rolling hills and spacious estates.
“The wedding? Less than an hour. But us–we’ve got the rest of our lives,” I remember Wesley saying with a laugh. But that was not to be.
After a leisurely brunch on Sunday, we made our way to the St. Louis Zoo, as our departures weren’t until Monday. “Let’s see what it’s like not to get high,” Wesley suggested. I secretly wondered if maybe this was an audition for future plans. Was there more to our relationship than having fun while smoking pot? Somewhere between the Monkey House and the African Savanna exhibit, however, that idea was dropped, and we returned to our familiar life together getting lost inside sweet marijuana smoke.
Monday came too quickly. At our pre-flight lunch, I hesitated before sharing some news. “Wesley, I was offered that job in Greece—the one with Greek cerebral palsied children. They want me to come in September.”
I kept my eyes on the sandwich on my plate, thinking, hoping, wishing he would say, “Don’t go to Greece. Come to Detroit. We’ll get an apartment, and you can find a job at the hospital. We can make a life together. Please, don’t go.”
Instead, Wesley began to describe Greek Town in Detroit with restaurants and shops and bars and nightlife, embellishing another world as only he could do. This time, however, I heard his magical world narration like a distant soundtrack, drowned out by my thudding disappointment. Wesley was again encouraging me to take wing.
At the airport we embraced in farewell. I hurried away, not daring to stop for one last glimpse of him, willing myself out of his orbit. I boarded the plane and left St. Louis that day, leaving my dreams behind in the midwestern landscape. What I carried back to Colorado was a heaviness, a darkness, an unrequited longing. In the evenings after work I would slink down in my black vinyl beanbag chair, listening to the male voice on the album that spun around on my stereo, teaching me the Greek alphabet and unlocking the Greek language. I ended up traveling to Greece in September on a journey that forever altered the course of my life.
Much about airports has changed in fifty years. What remains the same is their pivotal setting for transitions, with beginnings and endings that mark our lives as long as we remain travelers. On that October afternoon, I buckled my seatbelt and got ready to return to my East Coast life.
I watched the airplane consume the black tarmac as it sped down the runway. The line on the horizon became thinner and thinner, and I wondered at the particles of my decades-old longing which, surprisingly, still lodged somewhere in my heart. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca noted, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” As we lifted off the ground, I was grateful for this memory of my ended beginning.
Wow. That’s quite a set of memories unleashed…and so poignantly captured. ❤️
Yes, Sara, it was quite a bundle of memories!