To this day, I have no idea how many miles we had walked just to reach the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge that day. (And there was a picture of both Mike and me standing there that we must have coaxed someone else to take for us.) Unfortunately, though the day was still young enough, we had an evening flight from SFO to LAX to catch. And we still had to walk back into San Francisco, to the downtown airline terminal to catch the airport bus to San Francisco International.
The hike across the bridge had been a challenge. The hike back was interminable and even more of a challenge, including all of the many other blocks remaining until we again reached the downtown area. We finally stopped at one point at an old drug store with worn wooden floors that had a lunch counter, just so we could have a cold Coke to quench our thirst. (I don't even remember that we had stopped for lunch that day. We just didn't have the kinds of appetites we have now.) But we did desperately want a Coke.
We drank them in a bit of a hurry because we still had several more blocks to go to catch the bus. To our detriment, we forget to realize that we had not only been walking many uninterrupted miles, we had also been hiking up and down several hills, several very steep hills in many cases. Plus, not even drinking many fluids that day--no omnipresent bottled water in that era--and the late Coke did not help--we instantly realized, climbing down from the lunch counter stools, that our legs had cramped, painfully so.
We had no alternative but to keep pushing ourselves and our weary legs and, somehow, we managed to reach the terminal in time to catch a bus to the airport, in just enough time to catch our TWA 727-200 flight to LAX. With a few more minutes to spare before they announced the boarding, we finally changed our socks and felt infinitely better.
The late afternoon that our plane raced skyward, the sun was just going down. A young woman, a couple of years older than we, had taken the window seat; but she appeared to be lost in thought, head down, hands folded. Mike whispered to me, "Is she praying?" She heard his question and confirmed, "Why, yes, I am." We thought it strange but did not press the question any further.
I don't know which of our cars we had taken to the airport because we certainly no longer took the bus to get to the airport. But just like the lost photographs from that trip and the ones I retained to this day, some of the memories of that trip, enhanced by the remaining photographs taken along the way, are bright and clear as if that vacation were yesterday. Some memories, sadly, are lost for good, as if they were as long ago as that trip actually was, nearly 44 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment