Leaving on a jet plane...

My flight to Düsseldorf was a mixed bag. After the complimentary two glasses of wine, a Warsteiner beer, and a gin and tonic, I was hoping to sleep through the whole journey and avoid the showing of the German classic Drillbit Taylor. But there was lady next to me from Poland who was taking her 4 year-old son back to Poland. See gulped down a few glasses of white wine and laughed that she hadn’t been drunk since before she was pregnant. In half-English, half-Polish she spilled her entire life story. Moving from Poland to become a nure, getting pregnant at 40 with a son. She was from Chicago, where the long and demanding hours at the hospital downtown necessitated the hiring of a nanny. For some reason she chose a 74-year-old woman from Poland that was distant relative and was currently homeless in Chicago. Although I couldn’t imagine intrusting a child to a geriatric homeless woman in Poland the elderly are treated with such respect by their juniors that they are often able to do and get whatever they want. The nanny was horrible through, stealing from her, charging long distance phone calls and even beating her son with a belt once in a while, yet the woman didn’t fire the nanny for another two months deciding to take her son back to his grandparents in Poland. She told me all of this while son started bored in the seat next to her ripping apart the barf bags. She told he about being deposed at her job after a woman died after giving birth to twins who had undergone three previous c-sections. She told how she thought Chicago was dripping with racism, telling me that blacks, whites, mexicans and especially the polish would never get along. She told me about how America’s health system was the most corrupt and unfair system in the world. Then she fell asleep until we landed. I, however, found that I couldn’t sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time and landed in Düsseldorf with a little over an hour sleep under my belt.