In Japan, where you have to remove your shoes for so many things, you don't have to at airport security.
The large screens at the departure gate were showing sumo wrestling, perhaps the one sport I'd rather not see in high definition.
My seat was in the third to last row of the plane. The man across the aisle one row behind me had a cough like a bark, which he unleashed at regular intervals, usually just after I'd managed to doze off.
My personal screen was stuck on the movie Bandslam, so I read the last chapters of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. When I had finished, I tried to turn the overhead light off but the remote was not working. I went back to tell a flight attendant, who tried rebooting the video system without success. Then she sat in my seat and tried to turn off the light, also without success. With American (Airlines) ingenuity, she draped a cloth under the light - like an upside down tent - and taped it to the ceiling. There were seven more hours until we reached Dallas.
Somewhere over Idaho I got up and stood by the emergency door window in the back. Snow-covered mountains stretched for miles.
The line at immigration was surprisingly short (especially for the day before Thanksgiving.) "Welcome home," said the female officer, perusing my passport. With no bags to pick up, I exited and then came back in through security. Taking off my shoes I felt very nostalgic.
"There's nobody here," I marveled to the TSA people.
"Don't jinx it," one woman said. We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving.
The terminal was unexpectedly quiet. "Is there a store with a better selection of magazines?" I asked a newsstand cashier. "Would you like my Vanity Fair?" a woman paying for gummy bears asked. "I've finished it." And she pulled the thick December issue out of her bag and handed it to me.
Finally, the flight to Miami was announced. I presented my boarding pass and the attendant said to me, "You've had a long day."
Long but gratifying.
