LAST CALL:Farewell to All That
Pleszczynski, Wladyslaw
L A S T C A L L Farewell to All That by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski N HIS DEATH at the turn of the year, Gerald Ford was appropriately praised for his many good deeds, not least the easy...
...Talk about a civilized transfer of power...
...Families and friends these days deprive themselves of a ritual that once seemed indispensable, dropping people off at airports and stations with a wave and without even bothering to get out of the car...
...Nixon, of course, wasn’t merely going for a helicopter ride, but beelining to Andrews, from where he’d jet away for good to San Clemente...
...It’d be many, many months before I saw her again...
...The boarding scene in the recent Titanic movie pretty much captured the chaos I remember from that congested, crazy sendoff on a hot early summer’s day in San Pedro...
...We had a long car ride home during which to catch up...
...What happened next I can’t quite remember...
...These in my family set off a mixture of emotions...
...Oriana...
...My father always ran late, and there we were, stuck in Friday evening traffic along Century Boulevard near LAX, my sister’s flight home minutes from its scheduled landing...
...All was quickly forgiven...
...L A S T C A L L Farewell to All That by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski N HIS DEATH at the turn of the year, Gerald Ford was appropriately praised for his many good deeds, not least the easy dignity he brought to the presidency upon assuming it...
...Harbor...
...Ford saw the Nixons off...
...Nothing really, unless they’re eventually matched by homecomings...
...When, several years later, it was my sister’s turn to travel to Europe, she was in no hurry, choosing instead to go by ocean liner from L.A...
...However, I never much cared for his comment, “Our long national nightmare is over,” which was nothing more than an appeasing bone tossed at those who had turned their hatred of Richard Nixon into a cruel, destructive obsession...
...I much rather preferred something Ford did earlier that day—simply the gracious way in which he and Mrs...
...Boarding in those days was up some mobile stairs on the tarmac, and like Nixon before entering his helicopter, she turned and waved before going inside...
...Not to be at the gate when my sister came out of the plane was unthinkable, unimaginable, uncivilized...
...She was all dressed up, about to board one of the first American Airlines 707s for a flight to Montreal and from there to Warsaw, her first return to Poland since her escape to America a decade earlier...
...What’s so good about goodbyes...
...So it first seemed when I was very small, and I’d stand with my grandmother and sister at the top of our driveway and wave goodbye to my parents as they drove off for some big party or other in Los Angeles, a long hundred miles away from our home in Santa Barbara...
...Even shorter trips, back when people traveled less, took on an epic quality...
...It was a major milestone...
...7 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7...
...By evening all was calm, and sad, as driving to the hillside home of friends in San Pedro we could see the ship silently floating out to sea, all by itself, my sister somewhere within its confines...
...Travel used to be a lot more like that...
...The important thing is that we found her, or she found us, near the gate...
...I wouldn’t see her again for 14 months, though in occasional letters I would keep her abreast of our dog’s adventures...
...Does anyone still bother to say goodbye with any ceremony...
...Or maybe it was just the presence of our darling Irish setter (Nixon would later have one, another sign of his basic humanity), who, thirsty tongue hanging out, stood next to me on the pier, his front paws on the railing, his eyes darting but not finding my sister who was calling to him from behind another railing on board her ship, the S.S...
...Instead of Nixon being frog-marched from the White House, as the Joe Wilsons insisted, the overthrown president and his wife were escorted by its new proprietors down a rolled-out runway to a waiting helicopter, the foursome radiant and elegantly dressed, as if the Fords had just had the Nixons to tea...
...A half-dozen or so years later, everyone in my California family saw my grandmother off in Los Angeles...
...My mother seemed, well, frantic and upset...
Vol. 40 • February 2007 • No. 1
