I write today’s newsletter high above the planet Earth (and probably very late, by the time it’s published), as I fly from Abu Dhabi to Chicago. Because of a couple of Covid cases in the school, the entirety of the school had to switch to online learning for the last three weeks. We were scheduled to leave on the 25th, but after conferring with the family, it was decided that I and youngest daughter would leave early (the 11th) to head to Oklahoma to see family.

You see, I haven’t been to Oklahoma since 2016, and prior to that, it was 2014, so my hometown has been without my presence for a very long time. We were all going to go, but wife had things to do in school, and oldest daughter had friends who had come in from overseas and she wanted to hang with them (after being forced to hang with us for the longest Christmas break that ever existed). They decided to stay. That being said, I was pretty much done, as was my youngest, so we changed our tickets and were leaving in four days.

When I was younger, I used to enjoy plane travel. It was always an adventure; exotic airports, stressful taxis from the airport, the joy and misery of new cultures and trying to understand what it was that was happening. To travel to a new place was to do something that was extraordinary and nine times out of ten, the travel had to do with flying.