Welcome Home

I'm writing this within the confines of my home back in Puerto Rico. If I look out my window to my right, I can see the ocean. That's very comforting to wake up to, let me tell you. I wish I had this sense of peace and tranquility back in NYC. But of course, I don't. However, I think I wouldn't feel this inner calm if I spent all year long living here in my native island. This composure that has swept over me is due to one thing, and one thing only: I'm on vacation. In these past 10 days, I couldn't stop day-dreaming about my incoming trips to the beach, the deliciously greasy Puerto Rican food I would eat, and the overall lethargic state I would heartily adopt during my stay here. How I got here was inconsequential to me, just as long as I had plenty of time and days to swim in the ocean, get a tan, eat and sleep. Like any marathon runner, I didn't care for the race itself - I just wanted to reach the finish line and feel satisfied. Oddly enough, what proved a mentally-taxing experience for me, was, indeed, the process of getting 'home for the holidays'...

I was working my late night shift on Monday evening, and so, since I usually leave work around 2am, I had decided not to go to sleep and instead pack my suitcase and watch TV before my 8am flight. Subways weren't running so frequently, so I hitched a cab and I arrived at JFK a bit earlier than planned - around five in the morning. When I got there, however, a line of people equivalent to one you'd see at "Disney World" greeted me - throngs of couples and families anxiously waiting to go past Customs and reach their terminal. The line moved rather briskly, but these two young boys a couple of feet in front of me made the wait seem eternal, as they would not stop crying their eyes out. Their Nuyorican mother, who accompanied them and was visibly resigned, kept asking them to stay close to her, but the two kids consistently kept roaming in-between people, with one of them in particular plummeting on the floor and crying loudly, tears streaming down his face. At five in the morning, this was one scenario I did not want to encounter. The people around me kept staring incredulously at the mother and her young boys, and one older woman even volunteered to help out the young mother and carry one of her bags to the front of the line. As people looked on, I kept my mouth shut because, at this given moment, I did not want to be associated with this loudmouthed Hispanic family. Harsh as that may sound, I felt sheepish having people of my cultural background behaving in such an unrestrained, obnoxious way. I was running on fumes, what with zero hours of sleep, and I didn't have the patience to withstand these children's tantrums...

I ably deflected them and passed Customs. When I reached my gate, I plopped down on a seat and drank yet another cup of coffee to keep my spirits up. As I surfed the Internet, however, my efforts to stay focused and do some work on my laptop were thwarted by a walking cliche of a man: a moustached, middle-aged Hispanic individual sitting a few seats nearby who couldn't stop guffawing with a pal of his. What the hell could be so funny at five in the freakin' morning?, I thought to myself. I tried to listen to music and focus on whatever I was reading on my computer, but "Mr. Bigote" - with his pearly white teeth beaming every time he howled - kept disconcerting me. The man's jovial mannerisms, coupled with the blaring PA announcements overhead of a woman speaking Spanish very loudly, made me wince over how exasperating my surroundings were. I felt like Alex from A Clockwork Orange: unable to close my eyelids while being subjected to unpleasant voices and people in front of me.

Finally at one point, the waiting passengers settled into groups and people started congregating in front of the gate, waiting to be called in to board the plane. I began to gather my belongings in hopes of reaching my seat on time, but at that moment, a Puerto Rican man in a wheelchair appeared next to me. He quickly started talking to me, and I politely replied back and conversed with him. He told me that he had missed his original flight to PR and didn't know if he was on the "stand-by" list for the current flight. After exchanging a few words, the man suddenly offered his cellphone to me and asked if I could contact his son. He was confused as to which flight he was boarding and couldn't accurately talk with any of the attendants around. As I talked to the son on the phone, I realized that his father, the older man, was very incapacitated to be handling all of this flight mix-up. Although I did not want to abandon the frail man, I was also not under the best mindset (cranky, sleep-deprived, etc...), and I needed to take care of my own travelling issues. While we waited for an attendant to show up at the gate, the old man revealed to me that the reason he was in a wheelchair was because he had suffered a stroke last May and had been hospitalized ever since. His son, who lives in Connecticut, had dropped him off at the airport and thought he'd easily catch the flight to PR, but the father's vulnerable mental state and frail health prevented him from fully making sense of his flight situation. As soon as I saw a flight attendant at the front desk, I approached her and reminded her of the wheelchair-bound man, reiterating the fact that he was unattended and needed assistance to get home. I then walked back towards the man and wished him luck with his holiday travels, hoping deep down that his son would return to the airport on time and help him out...

I boarded my flight and settled into my seat. Now I could doze off and spend the next three hours sleeping! Then, as soon as I closed my eyes, I heard a whimper. But definitely not a human whimper. I turned and looked around, but I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary....until the yelping started, and then I realized that people had actually brought small dogs into the plane! Several American tourists were laughing among themselves at the sheer absurdity of it, obviously surprised at such a scene. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore this kooky behavior as much as possible. It would only be a couple of hours before I arrived home and I wouldn't have to deal with all this craziness...

My mom picked me up at the airport in Isla Verde, and I immediately ranted about all of the situations I had encountered. As I mentioned each one, she chuckled to herself and shook her head, but it didn't faze her much. You're not used to all those things anymore, she told me, as if yelping dogs inside airplanes were a common airplane routine. I'm not sure whether the owners of the dogs were Hispanic, but still, on a general level...has it really come to this? Are people's (*but specifically in this case, Puerto Ricans') behavior when traveling that predictable already that even the zaniest act is deemed ordinary, or normal? Most people are eccentric when they travel, but I have always known my 'people' to be a rambunctious kind (much more so than others), and this experience traveling home to PR opened my eyes once again to these idiosyncrasies of ours, so much so that it caught me off-guard and in turn made me restrain myself from showing my own 'Puerto Rican-ness.' All these taxing scenarios have now become a misconstrued representation of a certain part of my culture. However, despite indeed being flawed projections of who my 'people' truly are, they also conversely evoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia from my upbringing, and pinpoint to me the realization that home is always within reach.

That's sort of nice. I think.