1. Christy and Everett honked in front of Mom's house at exactly the right time, before 11:30, to pick me up to go to the airport. Mom's friend, Flo, called just as Christy pulled up, so Mom and I waved good-bye to each other. Simultaneously, I love my life in Maryland and, at the same time, I feel a strong pull to be back in Kellogg with Mom and to do things with Christy and Carol and to see my friends. I accept -- that is, I don't fight with the fact -- that I live a life divided between two places and two ways of life, but seeing Mom slowly become more frail and knowing I probably won't see my sisters until late spring or summer made walking out the door difficult.
2. My day of flying on Southwest was easy. As I did when flying out to Spokane, I flew over the USA listening to podcasts. I learned more about an annual day of corned beef sandwiches sold by the Jewish community of the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, MS on the podcast Gravy, here; I listened to Ed Levine interview Helen You, the owner of and dumpling creator at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing, Queens on Special Sauce, here; Radiolab, in collaboration with the Tampa Bay Times, is looking deep into police shootings in the USA and I got started listening to it, here and here; Burnt Toast presented a fun story on a 1950s kitchen appliance, the Roto-Broil 400, here; The Big Listen posted a segment of its episode coming up this weekend and it featured the show's two favorite middle-aged Jewish ladies, Ronna Glickman and Bev Ginsburg, characters played with little reverence by improv comedians Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo -- you can hear the entire episode, here; I went to the podcast Death, Sex, and Money where host Anna Sale interviewed Rashema Melson, the woman known as "the homeless valedictorian", about why she left Georgetown University, here; this interview led me another Anna Sale's interview, replayed on an episode of Snap Judgment, with "Emma", a sex worker, who talked about how and why she got into this line of work and how it affects her day to day. To conclude this episode, Anna Sale described a conversation she'd had with "Emma" recently that updated her story (spoiler: she quit giving sensual massages for money). By the way, I skipped the first two stories of this episode of Snap Judgment and found my way to the third story, featuring "Emma", here.
Have I mentioned that I love the way podcasts help me fly over the USA and make the trip seem brief?
3. I took a cab from the airport to our apartment home. The Deke had texted me that she was still up, so I was happy to walk in the door, embrace, and have a good talk about my week in Kellogg and the Deke's week in Greenbelt. It was good to see Maggie and Charly, too.
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