I drove faster than usual on my way home from the airport tonight. My ears are once again solidly blocked from the combination of a cold that lingers on and the variable air pressure in the plane. As a result, I couldn't hear the engine noise or the road noise or the wind noise while I was driving, and all I had to measure how fast I was going was the speedometer, which I, woefully, do not use very often.

Well, these wouldn’t qualify as adventures in most people’s lives, but when your life consists of work, running kids around to their activities, cleaning up the house (I am the lone compulsively neat person in a household of four humans and three cats who glare at me and shed), and more work, these are adventures of the highest order.

1. On the plane to Florida I sat next to a woman who spoke very little English. She wore an open weave white straw hat with crimson, teal and gold fabric trim. I eventually learned that she was from Jamaica and was going to be visiting her sister in Ft. Lauderdale. I helped her with her bag on the plane and parted company after we landed. She caught up to me at the baggage claim and was clearly confused about how to find her bag. The same belt was being used to deliver bags from a flight from Charlotte before our bags from Philadelphia appeared. My bag showed up quickly when the Philadelphia luggage was eventually unloaded, but I stayed around to make sure the hat woman’s bag was delivered. We waited until all the bags were off the plane but hers never showed up. She didn’t know what to do to find it, so I took her to the baggage office which was, surprisingly, not overrun with people describing lost bags. The baggage agent went back to the belt and found that her bag had been pulled off the belt for some reason. She clearly needed help carrying the bag since it weighed at least 1,000 pounds. And did not have wheels. I tried to understand how she was getting to her sister’s, which was a complex tale of someone coming to pick her up unless that person had to work in which case she had no idea whether she was ever going to leave the airport. I dragged her bag (along with my suitcase, briefcase and overly large pocketbook) to the curb and saw no one waiting to pick her up. It finally dawned on me that she might have a phone number for her sister, which she dug out of her datebook (dated 1999). Her sister apparently told her that no one was coming to pick her up, and that she needed to find a ride. I asked her about taking a cab, but the sister said that was too expensive and that she should take one of the airport limo services instead. The limo service was only about 50 feet from the door to the terminal, so the 1,000 pound bag only had to be deposited that far. I arranged for her transport with the limo company and left her sitting on a bench, waiting for the limo. She “God bless”ed me several times, which may just even out knocking over the statue of Mary last week. It all balances out, right?

2. When I got to the hotel I had a couple of hours before I had to attend the opening reception of the conference. Rather than sit around the hotel room or become enmeshed in work, I decided to head out to explore the area. When I reached my car, or at least what I thought was my rental car, I saw a guy trying to get into it. (He looked a good deal like the unscathed half of Siegfried and Roy – light hair, shirt open to the waist, twitchy eyes.). Even more startling was the fact that the backseat of my car appeared to be piled high with luggage and clothing, which I did not recall having left there. The guy was distressed and was looking in confusion between my rental car, a silver Oldsmobile, and his rental car, a silver Chevrolet, parked next to each other. He tried the door handle on my car and it wouldn’t open. When I approached, this was the conversation (such as it was, since it was all one sided and said in one breath):

“Is this your car?? I have no idea how I did this I’m in such a hurry I put my stuff in your car and then used the remote door lock and somehow locked your car and now I can’t get back into it and I’m in a real rush and I have no idea how I did this.”

I have no idea how he did it either. Apparently I left the back doors of my car open and he loaded his stuff in and then locked the doors. His claim that he used the remote locking mechanism was strange, however, because my car does not have a remote entry device. Whatever happened, I opened the car, he extracted his bags and clothing in a flash and zipped out of the parking lot, on to whatever destination he was racing toward.

3. My destination, which I took my time reaching, was the Boca Raton Museum of Art. It’s a beautiful little museum with a reasonable permanent collection and a number of special exhibits, including one containing windows from one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most celebrated prairie houses (The Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York). The windows were accompanied by faded and stained architectural drawings of the property, along with photographs that showed the house abandoned, in a state of neglect. The design and color of the windows was incredible; some of them were hung parallel to the floor so that you could look up and see light filtering through them. Most of the windows contained hundreds of tiny pieces of glass, painstakingly crafted into intricate designs, such as the well-known Tree of Life motif. I learned that one of Wright’s most innovative office buildings, the Larkin Building, was built in 1904 and demolished in 1950. This was one of the first buildings with air conditioning, an atrium, a cafeteria for the workers, and was reviled by architecture critic at the time. The museum also had an exhibition from their photographic collection, which included a Wallace Nutting print (my grandmother had several of this retouched, hand colored prints) and one of Edward Weston’s sensual photos of peppers. Definitely better than moldering away in the hotel room.