I  returned to Kansas City this afternoon, landing gear slapping down on a wet runway as a sixty-year old flight attendant with wrinkles and razor short hair told the lady in the first row for the twentieth time that she did not know the gate to which the passenger had to change but she would find out.  I had heard the attendant say that she had been awake and in the air since two a.m. and wanted nothing more than a long night’s sleep and silence.

The third in a series of skinny, wiry men hauled my sorry butt down the concourse and pushed me at breakneck speed to the baggage carousel while my friend Katrina circled the airport and sent me text after text checking on my status.  Eventually I made it to the Holmes house.  I threw my arms around Katrina when I learned that her birthday present to me had been weeding the garden that she, Paula K-V, and the neighbor’s girlfriend had planted for me this spring.

That same garden greedily drinks the rain as I sit at the open window listening to This American Life and thinking about what I learned on my trip to California.

Here it is.

I can live for eleven days without television.  Including the Food Network.

I can also survive for the same eleven days with only the clothes in a large suitcase, the medicines and toiletries in one large clear zip make-up bag, two jackets, a hat, a shawl, and my computer.

Six words:  Hot shower in a walk-in stall.  Is that seven?

I will live on the Pacific Ocean.  Not this year.  But maybe next year.  Certainly soon enough to have a life there.  I will.

Fifty-percent of people in an airport do not see someone sitting in a wheelchair.

The benefits of TSA-Pre justify the eighty-five bucks and the need to make an appointment to have your finger-prints scanned and answer the same questions in person that you answered online in advance.  (I think they just want to make sure you can tell the identical story twice.)

The doctors at Stanford share this characteristic with my favorite Family Medicine doctor here:  They will acknowledge if they don’t know how to fix you; and they will recommend someone else who might be able to do so.

Reaching in a jacket pocket and finding sand from the Great Sand Dunes National Park while standing on a beach in California makes me smile.  Mingling the fine white Colorado sand with the coarse, pale brown sand of the Pacific?  Priceless.

Nine words:  All that I am.  All that I can be.

One word:  JOY.

It’s the thirteenth day of the thirty-third month of My [Endless] Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.