The day I was due to fly down to Baltimore and meet up with Kimba, Robin and their family. The plan was I'd spend a couple of days there, after which Kimba and I would fly back, meet up with Alex and his friend Flep who was coming up from Texas in the meantime, and then travel together up to AAC in Albany.
I felt a sadness as Alex and I left the campground for the last time, mixed with a sense of excitement at the meetings and adventures which lay ahead. This was the first of many occasions on which I would experience these emotions intermingled, and I often wondered how different it must feel for my hosts, for whom 'Tim's trip' effectively began and ended with what, for me, was always a chapter in an ongoing story (I suppose this is how everyone's _life_ really is, in relation to everyone else's, and everyone's story is always on-going, intersecting others.) On the other hand, my friends didn't have to say goodbye so many times. Even though this was a temporary parting, it was poignant, as it was the end of my 'private' time with Alex, of the time by the lake, the verdant Massachusetts countryside, and a goodbye to my first 'home' in the USA. (I'm lying on the beach at sunset writing this, a huge arc of sand in high summer, the ocean burnished gold and silver; all this seems so near, and far away.)
My flight was to leave from Providence airport, though our trip took us nowhere near Providence proper this time. On the way we stopped for lunch at a franchise place whose name escapes me, but Alex explained it was a sort of 'upmarket' version of Wendy's or McDonalds. "Oh, yeah", the guy in the queue in front of us agreed. "You should be wearing a tie." (The photo on the web version shows Alex's car parked, if I'm right, in the lot of this food-joint. Note the large number of Meekos visible within. Ever generous, Alex was giving these away to his friends at AAC.) From the vicinity of the airport I spotted another curious food outlet: "Legal Seafood". Ok...
(a short diversion at this point: on browsing an atlas today, to find out just how many Salems there _are_ in the USA (I found nine), I noticed two towns whose names seem too delightful not to mention. The first is 'Normal', IL. The other is 'Mound City', MO. I admit that this latter might appeal to me due to my purely idiosyncratic fondness for the word 'Mound', and for any city called "(name of some object) City", but 'Mound City' does have a certain visual suggestiveness which is hard to resist. Further intelligence revealed that there is another Mound City in South Dakota. You can immediately see a difference between the American and Australian approach to naming things. If this had been in Australia, we would have given it a less visually suggestive name, but then appended "Home of the Big Mound.")
Alex saw me off at the airport (I felt a little emotional, though I knew I'd be seeing him again soon enough), and I boarded the Northwest Airlines short-hop flight to Baltimore. This was a terrific flight. Australian airlines have the world's best safety record. I don't know whether this is the cause of, or an effect of their tedious, rehearsed, paternalistic attitude to their passengers, but it was a welcome relief to fly with such a relaxed crowd as Northwest. No seating allocations - just get on the bloody plane and sit somewhere, like catching a bus. The male steward walks up and down the aisle throwing food at passengers, sometimes from halfway down the aircraft. He must have thrown about ten packets of nuts at the guy sitting next to me (by comparison, Japanese stewardesses are extremely polite and reserved, and rather than hurling nuts about the cabin, they hand out steaming, warm, rolled-up blue towels, offering them to you with plastic tongs. What the point of this was, I was never sure. People seemed to agree that you were meant to put them over your face, though how having a hot, wet towel draped over your face is meant to be refreshing (especially when it's about 90o F outside) is something I couldn't decide.)
My first thought on seeing the city as we descended over Baltimore, was "This place is flat!" In fact, as I later discovered, much of the Eastern and inner US is flat (at least to a Tasmanian), and people who live there are inclined to become emotionally excited upon driving over bumps in the road. Perhaps this flatness goes some way towards explaining why mounds were considered so noteworthy by the early settlers.
There was no way I could miss Kimba at the airport. It would have been the most unlikely coincidence that more than one person was wearing a Kimba the White Lion T-shirt. Kimba confessed he didn�t quite know what to say, which was perhaps as well, as I think I was in an unusually effervescent mood at the time, and probably did enough talking for two people.
The style of urban architecture varies quite markedly from city to city in the USA - something which isn't so true back home. If the land in Baltimore was unusually flat, the houses were unusually square. This may not seem a peculiar thing, as we're inclined to think of houses as generally rectilinear, but after the emphatic squareness of these Baltimore dwellings, the squareness of New England houses seemed quite frivolous and half-hearted. _These_ houses were very serious about being square, and the way in which they achieved this objective with so little compromise lent them a paradoxical exoticness- a sort of audacious excess of restraint.
Kimba's house is, I believe, right on the city limits of Baltimore, in a pleasant suburban setting which might have been in any Australian city (any Australian city with very square houses flying US flags.) There was no-one home when we arrived (forgive me if I mis-remember any of this), and Kimba and I spent a while in the back yard, talking about this and that - particularly about ALF, as I recall. I suppose it's worth noting that this was back when ALF was relatively young, just after it's explosive period ('two consecutive quarters of positive growth' would be the boardroom term.) I'd first 'met' Kimba when he debuted on ALF on New Year's Day - they day the newsgroup received an unprecedented 12 articles! It had been an exciting, inspiring time, and it was probably inevitable that we start on such relatively familiar territory.
Some time later we went to pick Robin up from work. Of course there are always things about a person which you miss out on, in email or usenet, and some people will resemble their VR projections of themselves more than others do. Two things you miss out on if you don�t meet Robin IRL are her wit, which manages to be sort of warm and sardonic at once, and her cool accent. I hadn�t really heard a Baltimore accent yet, as Kimba wasn't a native. When I did start hearing it from Robin, and on the streets and around the place, it sounded strangely familiar. I worked out later that I'd heard it before in the narrator's voice in John Waters' 'Pink Flamingos' - set, of course, in Baltimore. I'd always imagined the actor was just putting on that deliciously peculiar long-o sound ('road' becomes 'roo-wood', or sometimes 'rew-wood'), but happily, he'd only been exaggerating it a bit. (Philadelphia accents seem pretty much the same, from what I can tell, but I've not heard that same long-o anywhere else. I hope people don't mind me dwelling on their accents, but I find the regional variation in accents very pleasing for some reason, and quite a few more people will probably come up for this sort of description before I'm through.)
The other thing you miss out on, of course, is her cooking, but I don't think I can do that justice here.
By evening the whole family was home - Kimba, Robin, Neeko, Dan, and the cats. It's probably not realistic to call four cats 'a houseful', but by means of their mobility, agility and inquisitiveness, the cats of the home did manage to convey the impression of being everywhere at once. Sarsha, sitting on the arm of the couch, and still a little unsure of whether to approve of her new surroundings, was even less certain whether to approve of the ginger Kitten Arnie, who immediately leapt up to investigate her. The other plush were subjected to similar scrutiny.
Alex had visited with Kimba and Robin's family a few weeks earlier, and had given them a 'rave review'. It was a pretty daunting accolade to live up to, but everything I'd heard was true. I don't wish to embarrass them too much here; I'll just say that Kimba, Robin, Dan and Will are a true family, and I'm ashamed to say that seeing the warmth and happiness they share in each other's presence, I often felt sadly inferior in terms of my own ability to convey this sortof warmth to members of my own family.
The rest of the day was spent just settling in, hearing some music, bashing my head on that low beam in the basement, meeting Houdini and the other cats properly, and finally crashing out on the fold-out bed, which Kimba's family had actually bought just because I was staying for a few days. So I could sleep, they turned on the air conditioning for the first time that summer. Baltimore, as I was to learn, is very humid in summer, and Americans, so it seems, or maybe furries, are very generous people.
(a note: I mistakenly typed 'the gruber kitten, Arnie', rather than 'the ginger kitten', and my spellcheck wanted to change this to 'the goober kitten, Arnie. That actually seems to fit better than 'ginger'.)
