Of Reunions and Travelin' Pants
Jen and I catch up with Alicia Serrano and Wilfried Osberger in Terminal Four of the JFK airport in New York City. Alicia is sitting at a cafe and sipping coffee while Wil wanders around the sleek terminal, looking for us. He is dressed in a white t-shirt that proclaims "Australia", his native country, in bold letters on the front. Alicia's black Spanish hair is considerably shorter than the last time we saw her, and while they both smile large friendly grins, there is a tiredness behind their eyes when we greet them and exchange hugs. Their fatigue does not surprise us as they had quit their jobs on Friday, got married on Saturday, packed up their apartment and moved their stuff into storage on Sunday and Monday, and then caught a transatlantic flight from Barcelona to New York on Tuesday. At some point over the last couple of years, Wil and Alicia came down with the travel flu and decided the only way to completely recover from it was to let the infection run its course. And so, in the next nine months they will be traveling around the world.
This dastardly disease translates into good luck for Jen and me as it gives us a chance to see them again. The last time we saw Wil and Alicia was when they dropped us off at small airport of Girona in the Costa Brava region of Northern Spain. We had slept on their futon in their small apartment in Barcelona for six weeks while we were traveling the year before.
The clerk at the discount airlines where we were checking in to fly to London wanted to charge us two Euros for every kilo we were above the very low baggage weight limit. With time running out before we needed to board the plane, Jen and I ripped through our bags. The first thing my hands landed on was a pair of tan, tattered khaki pants - the only pair of pants I had carried in my own pack for the last nine months. Jen pulled out a large square cement tile out of her bag. It was part of a sidewalk in Barcelona and was imprinted with a stylized shape that suggests a flower - the symbol of the "Route of Modernisme" in Barcelona. Jen and I had liberated it from a pile of junk on one of the city's beaches. We looked at each other and Jen stuffed the tile into her carry-on bag and I handed Wil my pants.
"Just throw them away," I told him.
Wil, who grew up on a farm near Brisbane, knows the value of stuff and he instead took the pants to Alicia's grandmother in Sant Cugat and she shortened and hemmed them into a pair of shorts. Almost a year later, he packed them into his backpack for the trip and my pants have come full circle and then some. After the next nine months, those now shortened pants will have traveled farther than most people - they will have been worn in North America, Asia, Europe, Central America, South America, and Africa. I'm hoping that global warming happens quickly enough that we can find someone to wear them in Antartica.
On the way out of the JFK terminal, Wil quickly shows me his new wedding ring - the gold glistens in a way that only really new jewelry does. He gives me another one of his quick grins and he and Alicia press their rings together, fist to fist, in a superfriends maneuver as we step out of the airport and into New York City.
