I wrote an e-mail yesterday to David Neeleman, CEO of Jet Blue, responding to his personal e-mail to me as a Jet Blue loyalist, in which he apologized to me along with all his other customers, promising a "passenger's bill of rights" and compensation if another horror ever takes place as it did in the ice storm at JFK, where passengers were kept on runways for up to twelve hours with no chance of escape, food or clean toilets. I congratulated him on his unending round of public mea culpas, from the Today Show to Letterman, because he took full personal responsibility, admitted all the airlines' errors, and promised he would do all possible to rectify and see that it never happened again. My congratulations were based on the fact that he stepped up, something none of our leaders have seemed able to do, and suggested he run for president.
Thia after a blow up among the Democratic frontrunners, Obama and Hillary, because David Geffen, a very deep pocket and a very big mouth, threw a fund raiser for Barack and a brickbat at the Clintons, via Maureen Dowd, the savvy and extra sharp editorial columnist for the NYTimes who must have been exhilarated beyond belief that she had a new target besides her aptly labeled but (it was getting tired) Vice. For those of you on distant shores, the brouhaha was created by Geffen's saying the Clintons lie with "great ease", Hillary is polarizing and unelectable. I happen to agree with the last, and hope that all of this, her contained but perceptible rage, decrying against Democratic infighting, and asking Obama to step away from Geffen, and the money raised, (it was Big Time,) which Barack has declined to do. So he hasn't taken the high road that so far he has skated along, all of which is okay with me, as I hope it will clear the arena for the man I think can do the job, John Edwards, the only one of any of them whom I have believed all along, including when he took the 2nd spot to the phlegmatic, pompous and disappointing Kerry. From the first time I listened to Edwards, I was convinced that every word that he spoke he really meant, and that they were from the heart, which he still visibly has. His wife is no less touchingly magnetic, having lost a child then had two more, and is a breast cancer survivor without wallowing. They seem truly estimable people, and it would be a major healing for this country to have people as our hood ornament who were genuinely admirable for a change, not driven by self-interest or oil, or satanic, sweaty, growling billiard balls(I wonder who she means by that?)
Anyway, in spite of my sincere regard for the airline, we left Burbank this morning for New York and headed instead for Denver as the plane didn't have enough fuel what with the heavy load and the wrong runway out. And twas then I began thinking about what must have happened to the pets that Jet Blue allows you to have under the seat for a fee during that ordeal in New York, and what Mimi might have endured.
Mimi, as friends know, has been traveling with me everywhere, and in spite of the fact that she should know by now that she will not be left behind, gets crazy for several days before I leave, which she knows out of some deep brilliance and intuition that seems not to carry over to the fact that she will be going along. So I can't start packing until just before. Even so, she guards the door for several days, and once there is luggage, sits on it, lest I leave her behind.
A very smart friend suggested to me that I put Mimi's travel case out the day before so she understands she's going too. I did that yesterday, and last night I couldn't find Mimi and she was in it. She slept in it all last night,
LATER: I am rescinding the letter I wrote to Neeleman. Though we arrived in NY only an hour past our original slated time, it took us another hour and a half to get our luggage. Then there were no taxis and it was cold. My solution" STAY HOME. But first: FIND OUT WHAT REALLY FEELS LIKE HOME.
