Million Miles

Yesterday JC brought home an official-looking package he had received in the mail at the office. Navy blue with vertical navy stripes in matte and glossy alternations. A horizontal silver stripe across the middle, labeled "Million Miler". The box came from United Airlines.

I immediately thought of George Clooney's movie "Up in the Air" and his pursuit of the holy grail of the business traveler. This wasn't it. This was a Premium Gold card and matching luggage tag and a letter of congratulation.

A million miles is pretty significant, particularly when you measure it against a life. I realize that jets go pretty fast, but if each of those miles consumed a minute, that would add up to nearly two years. And if you consider the to and fro, the reservations and boarding passes, the packing, the trips to the airport, the security lines, the check-ins, the waiting at the gate, the inevitable delays, the taxi rides, the hotel hassles, the rental car shuttles and all the attendant nonsense of traveling, I'd bet that that would not be an outrageous approximation of what those million miles mean. And this was only one of the many airlines he has traveled. There's Delta and USAir and American and Southwest and airlines that are no more who have not weighed in on total miles, not to mention the trains and automobiles in that holy trinity of travel.

Two years plus.

I wrote a poem once for our anniversary that catalogued all the time we've spent apart. It's not just travel that has separated us--it's the workday world, the jobs, the meetings, the activities, the kids' lessons, our own classes and responsibilities and chores, the trips to the cleaners, the grocery-shopping, the time spent driving from here to there and back again.  And yet, and yet..for all the time we've been apart, we have been together for 38 years. If you subtract all that apart time, I guess it's no wonder that it seems like only yesterday we met.