Search, Find.

ANYLF has the distinct pleasure of reporting live this morning from 19153, oddly en route to 47404. Why one must sail through the grand eastern megalopolis to find Indiana is not entirely beyond me — I have a basic and approximate understanding of going one place to get to another — but it's odd to be here, and to be here in this way, which, in an airport, is of course no kind of here at all. Sbarro. Au Bon Pain. The beeping carts carrying the arthritic and the otherwise wounded. CNN playing nearly audibly nearly everywhere. Carpet in that hushed terminal tone, in all the senses of that word.

For the entirety of the flight from there to here, the woman in seat 1A was furiously working her E-Z READ LARGE PRINT SEARCH & FIND #3 word search book. The cover urged her to collect all four, but it looked like she had her hands full with the first puzzle in the book: ________OLOGY: IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Words to be found included ZOO and ORNITH. Seemed to me like if you found ZOO you'd have at a bare minimum one too many Os, but I'm no expert in the Search & Find field. Enough days it seems like I can't do either. I feel like I should also herein note that she was drawing lines through the words instead of circling them in long ovals, which felt like heresy, but during the course of our 55-minute flight I could not quite find the way to explain to her that she was doing it all wrong.

Crisp and cool here, and it looked from the plane like they're about two weeks behind our spring, but there were blooms in spots as we came in over clear-cut developments and coastal whatnots and shipping concerns. Bridges look really quite fragile from however many thousand feet. Some fields greening over. Some not. On takeoff out of PTI I could see the mountains out of the right-hand side of the plane, just over the top of the word search. I hate to fly. I love the view.

We did, I think, survive both the Tuesday freeze and the Wednesday frost in 27408. We didn't cover anything over last night — took our chances — but I left before sunrise this morning and it was already well into the forties, so I'm feeling fine about the big azaleas. It's supposed to be right at 70 in Bloomington, about which I'm feeling a little less fine: I'm headed in to hear my brother read for his MFA thesis at IU, and I'm headed in, too, by default, I guess, to see my parents and my sister-in-law's parents, both sets of which are in town to witness live and in the flesh the spanking-new 10-day-old grandchild. There's meant to be a cookout tomorrow night for all of us. Possible here to say that maybe all of us don't always get along so perfectly well. Hey, last-minute semi-trans-continental airplane ticket decision. Hey, deeply odd dinner party. Hey, kid my brother made.

Lots of younguns here in gate B-10. Lots of shrieking. Children love this gate, I guess. Somebody ought to buy them a sugared doughnut. Maybe a soda to go with that. Jackson. Jackson. Jackson! Put that down. Put that down. What did I say?

Jackson can move pretty well. They just brought him back from gate B-14, which is way the hell down past the Jet Rock Bar & Grill. Then they just now let him go, and he's headed out the other way, top speed, for other gates. Maybe to Cincinnati. Maybe to Bermuda. They keep paging the passengers for the flight to Bermuda. If I could figure out a way to get myself on that plane, I might even be willing to ride with Jackson. I wouldn't once ask him what I said. I'm pretty sure he'd have no idea in the world. That kid seems pretty busy with other things.