Coming Home

We’re back, and I’ve regained the reigns on the keyboard. There’s plenty to talk about in terms international experiences, possible recovery outcomes, etc, but for the sake of Carepage posting limitations, I’ll keep it down to today’s travel. We got up in Lisbon at 2:30am local (9:30pm eastern Saturday night), which got us to the airport by 4am. This will be more than a 24-hour day, but my plan is to press on until a typical bedtime here to expedite readjusting the body clock back to where it’s used to be. We made it home Sunday afternoon at about 3:30pm. The travel was relatively easy, just long, as expected. The transfers on and off the planes were fine, and any worries we had about negotiating a cross-airport gate change during a one-hour time window in Amsterdam were put aside with the help we received from the airport staff.

On the way over to Portugal, the woman who sat next to me was very much interested in my surgery and so we talked at length about it and she was very helpful in getting me situated. When I boarded today the man in the window seat next to me was already seated and listening to his iPod. So I figured this would be a run-of-the-mill “you do your thing, I’ll do my thing over here” type flights; which is fine because I was gassed and was completely content on just watching the movies and going to sleep. But, up front before take-off, the flight attendants are constantly coming by and offering passengers stuff - drinks, magazines, snacks. I noticed that the flight attendants all knew this guy’s name. You must have to fly a lot to be recognized by the crew, ask you how you’ve been, etc. One of the crew asked him if he was still in Minneapolis, which kind of explained things as Minneapolis, Detroit, and Amsterdam are all NWA hubs. If this guy did a lot of business travel that could account for the name recognition, but he said that no, he was in LA now.

We started talking because I needed his help setting up the TV screen, so he asked about the movies I watched on the way over, which ones were good, and vice versa. The hilarious thing was that he had an LA celebrity encounter story for several of the stars of the films being shown. He explained how it was so strange that he runs into people like Annette Benning and Warren Beatty trick-or-treating with their kids, that Angelina Jolie lives in his neighborhood, and that he told his wife to keep an eye out for Brad Pitt.

I thought that he must be sort of movie producer or studio executive, but it turned out that he is a TV anchor name Paul Magers (pronounced “Majors”) from KCBS in LA and used to be an anchor in Minneapolis for 20 years. He was in Rome covering the death of the pope for the local LA news. We didn’t talk much about the pope, but I guess his crew spent the entire trip doing live feeds back to LA, so they were in the middle of the night for most of their time there. But here’s what I learned from Anchorman Paul Magers about the pope: (1) he’s not embalmed. Magers said, “He was looking pretty bad by the Friday, sunken cheeks, drooping nose and chin.” (2) the pope literally has no possessions. Magers said, “even his shoes are issued to him from the Vatican.” No word on if they took the shoes back. (3) their crew was setup on the roof of a monastery, and he said they felt bad because in the course of a live newscast, it’s inevitable there will be the occasional problems, and they kept swearing in front of the nuns.

He ended up being pretty cool and very knowledgeable about Michigan in general. He’s a big fan of the Boyne Mountain – Traverse City region. He said if people from northern Minnesota saw some of northern Michigan, they probably wouldn’t think so highly of themselves. I guess he has some golf buddies who went to Michigan State, and he commented on how they were always wearing their green MSU stuff. We talked Michigan football. He asked why Michigan doesn’t go undefeated every year, and I was like, “You’re preaching to the choir, man.” But I told him lately it was the inability to stop mobile quarterbacks. He got a kick out of the fact I told him OSU fans are notoriously hostile to Michigan fans in Columbus, and that they only graduate 40% of their student body (that might be a slight exaggeration).

After we landed in Detroit, as he packed up all his stuff, we're exchanging well wishes, etc., he asked me, “Dan, have you ever seen the group Train, perform?” To which my reply was, “No,” expecting him to suggest I see them in concert, like maybe that was what he was jamming to on his iPod earlier. He then said, “But you know who they are. Seen their videos?” “Yes.” “Well I’ve been trying to think of who you remind me of, and it just dawned on me that I think you look like the lead singer of Train.” I didn't have the heart to tell him I think Train sucks.

When I got home, I tracked him down online, and here’s a link to his video coverage of the pope. The thing is his TV voice is way deeper than his actual speaking voice.