Every first morning of my big trips follows the same pattern. After a poor night's sleep, I wake up long before my alarm clock, and get up with no feeling of hurry. I have time to kill, so instead of getting ready, I make some coffee, and read the paper, and take photos of the pretty sunrise and ... before I know it, I only have thirty minutes to shower, and finish packing, and I end up being in a mad rush!

Once in the air, I relaxed into my comfortable business-class seat, and surveyed my fellow passengers. It was as if some director had cast them for one of those seventies airliner disaster movies; a carefully diverse blend, each with their own story. The gay couple in the seats in front of me. The Chinese couple behind the bulkhead, who spoke not a word of English and relied on their son to come forward from steerage periodically to translate things for them.

A dapper, muscular man in the seat across the aisle, who was typing on his laptop with the screen set at an angle which made it impossible for him to see what he was typing. He wore funky looking dark glasses, and a sophisticated radio-like device in a holster on his hip. I thought the glasses were maybe a futuristic computer monitor, and the radio something issued by the CIA. He was traveling with a much older grey-haired lady who'd looked out of place, earlier in the flight, when she literally curled up in his lap as if she was a little girl. Definitely an odd couple. It was only later in the flight, when the muscular guy got up and groped his way to the restroom, white stick in hand, that I realized he was blind.

His disability, and his painfully slow progress to the restroom didn't stop the ancient, wizzened, New York couple behind them from loudly complaining each time he got up, that his slow groping around was obscuring their angle to the television. They were anxious at missing even a few seconds of Letterman on CBS' "Eye on America".

And then there was me, reading a painstakingly detailed account of Nixon's White House years, and later tearing up at the ending of the in-flight movie, "Big Fat Liar". It never fails. I always get teary during in-flight movies, don't ask me why.

I'd arranged a limo to pick me up at JFK, since I was arriving at rush hour, and it wouldn't end up being much more expensive than a cab, and I wouldn't have that dreadful anxiety about the ticking meter. I was met by a large, kindly African-American man named Roland who mysteriously said I'd been upgraded at no extra charge, and that I wouldn't have any problems with legroom. I was curious to know what the next level up from a Lincoln Towncar would be. And it was ... an extended Towncar; you know, one of those long, ugly cars that take kids out after the prom so that they can stand with their heads sticking out the sunroof and scream at pedestrians. Roland took me on a speedy drive through the backroads of Queens, with a beautiful evening sun slanting down over the rooftops, playing a tape of my favorite singer, Frank Sinatra.

After about half an hour, I caught my first glimpse of the skycrapers of midtown and downtown; the first time I've seen downtown absent the World Trade Center. The downtown cluster of towers looked more like the skyline of a midsize city like Providence, now that the huge twin-towers were gone. By the time we reached the city, the traffic slowed to a crawl, the noise of fire-engines was starting to get to me, and I was even tiring of old Frank Sinatra on the speakers. Maybe I should have gone somewhere quiet for my vacation.