SUNDAY, JULY 5
HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY, JIG! We had to leave the Marin Hotel in Bergen just after four a.m. to begin the long journey back home to San Diego. My photo du jour is a timed exposure taken from our fifth floor hotel room in Bergen at 2:45 a.m. The street alongside the harbor was as busy as it had been when we went to bed at nine p.m. Later when we went out to get on our bus to the airport, tired revelers, mostly young people were meandering, sometimes staggering toward their homes. Our flights from Bergen, Frankfurt, and Chicago were all on time... no hassles. Watching travelers is one of the pleasures of a journey.

On any day of travel it is usual to see panic, relief, joy and confusion. A young man from Turkey sitting a couple of seats in front of me on the flight from Chicago to San Diego discovered that he had misplaced his student visa and all of his Travel papers. He looked frantically through his computer bag and his camera bag and didn’t find them. As the plane was pulling away from the terminal, he was asked by flight attendants to stay seated and was reassured that they would help with the search as soon as the plane was ten minutes into the flight. As soon as he could get up he came back to me and looked pleadingly for help in communicating with the attendants. It must be some teacher-look I still have. We tried our common languages and found they didn’t match, so we fell back on English. I asked if the lost papers were “student visa.” Yes! I asked which university, and he said English academy; so I knew he would be one of several English language schools, perhaps the one in Mission Valley close to where I live. I talked with an attendant who said they would telephone back to Chicago's United terminal and ask the staff there to check the boarding area. I tried to reassure him that he could get duplicate papers in San Diego. He said, No, No, only these are good... So the search goes on. He is wearing a shirt with the English word “DIRTY” in large letters slashed across the chest. I doubt that he knows what the word means. He can’t be much more than seventeen or eighteen. I will give him my phone number and will offer to help in San Diego if he doesn’t locate the lost papers before we disembark.

In the terminal before boarding I watched a middle-age woman reassuring and comforting the tiny, wiry dog she was carrying in a designer pet bag. THIS ISN'T ME, but it's how I felt in the middle of the 26-hour marathon set of flights from Bergen to San Diego.