Going my way?

I’ll be gone to a conference in Atlanta for a week so won’t be posting much. But when I do, I’ll tell you about some of my memorable business trips. I’ve sat next to a neurotic flight-phobic who turned out to be one of my own authors. I’ve discussed lacrosse and bull fighting, of all things, with Frederick Bush, III, on a long flight home. I’ve learned about lesbian Episcopalian preachers from essayist Doris Grumbach. I’ve even sat through a four-hour flight squeezed next to poet David Mura without ever uttering one single syllable.

But the story I’ll share with you now is of one of the first business trips I took for West Publishing. I was meeting a professor from Yale at the home office of a book packager in North Scituate, a small seacoast village on the Cape between Boston and Plymouth. Very New Englandy.

I had a week’s vacation planned with my family at Big Wolf Lake near Bemidji right before I was due to fly out to Boston. I had been working twelve- and thirteen-hour days for weeks back at the office and wasn’t about to cut my vacation short for this book meeting, so I decided to fly directly out of Bemidji International.

West was a small player in the college textbook world but we were having some success wooing big-name authors over to our imprint, and one of the ways we courted them was by setting up big meetings where we showcased our editorial and design, and marketing and sales plans for their books. I normally would have flown in with an acquisitions editor but they were letting me take this one alone.

The book packager, a fairly hard-hitting production coordinator who had put in her time at Prentice-Hall, saw that my flight into Boston was right at the peak of the city’s rush hour. She said, “Who booked your flight? Have they never seen Boston at 5 pm?” She told me to take the Cape bus down to Scituate and then a cab right to my seaside hotel. She’d come over to get me later for dinner. Sounded good.

We had played hard at the lake: lots of skiing and fishing and late-night beach drinking. I waited until the very last minute and then we jumped in the truck and sped across Highway 2 to the airport. I had my hair in pigtails, my old fish gut-encrusted wash pants, my tan Converse sneakers, and an old Camel cigarette baseball tee (this was before we all agreed cigarettes were really bad for you). I got to the gate just in time and walked out on the runway before they pulled up the door.

You should know I was pretty green in those days. Green as in green-around-the-gills green. Earlier I had given a presentation to some staffers about fine art we could use on our textbook covers. I had successfully art-directed a kickin’ Introduction to Statistics cover using Rembrandt sketches—drawings of children at play, women gossiping, beggars and quacks. So in my presentation I gave the group lots of possibilities—all good—except I pronounced Pissaro as “piss-a-row” and couldn’t get a straight face from the group thereafter.

So I’m in my window seat heading to Minneapolis where I would transfer from this small twin-prop to a large Northwest Airlines jet. I had a checklist, as I always do when I travel, of all my needs. Navy skirt suit. Check. Taupe stockings. Check. Pearl bracelet. Check. The eighties were a time when business seemed more formal. It was before cell phones. (It was also before 9/11 when people could wait for passengers right at the gate. . . .) I had my design portfolio in the overhead bins above me. I had my art inventories and schedules in my briefcase beside me. I was set.

When we got to the Minneapolis airport there was a mechanic’s union slowdown. Think Jet Blue, only not so long. We sat on the tarmac for four hours. Finally, they let us off and I was up in the air again. I never even thought about my connecting bus plans. I had a book; I had ordered a drink, and I was set.

When I got off the plane at Logan I definitely felt out of place, and out of sorts. When did my bus leave? What time was it anyway? Why are all these people talking and walking so fast, so different from the lakers up in Bemidji? And then I saw this sharply dressed woman, with a dark suit and serious pumps and she was holding up a sign with my name on it. I realized it was after 9 p.m. and she must have decided to pick me up after all since rush hour was clearly over.

Oh my god, I could have died. Really. I didn’t think I had the chutzpah to pull off this first encounter so I walked right by her. She wouldn’t have known me from boo. I mean she didn’t even turn her head when I walked by. But right before the escalator down to baggage claim, I realized I shouldn’t leave her. I walked back against traffic and set down my brief and backpack, put out my hand, and introduced myself to the Hillary Clinton-lookalike (though this one had dark, dyed hair). That once-over was the longest I’ve ever endured, from either a man or a woman.