I am always a little apprehensive when I get off the airplane for an occasional visit to Palm Springs. This particular time, I had been invited by a friend and his wife and the timing was good because it had been raining in the Pacific Northwest for almost two weeks. I welcomed the hot blast of the desert and was looking forward to a few rounds of golf while there.
After we landed, and as I looked out the window of the plane, I counted 17 wheelchairs lined up to haul passengers from the bottom of the ramp to their waiting desert limousines.
As I sat and waited, the man just in front of me was very concerned that his special wheelchair was not going to be there when he got off the plane.
He made it to the galley in the front of the plane and onto a special chair that was bolted to a pallet mounted on a forklift. They unloaded him with that forklift from the other side of the plane, the same way they load and unload the galley.
A few minutes later, I saw my first doublewide wheelchair. It had dual, white, side-walled tires on it. As I was walking along, being passed by this doublewide wheelchair, I was also being passed on the other side by a baggage attendant/wheelchair pusher who was pulling two wheelchairs. He was running along between them, with one hand on each of them, rushing to get them to the next incoming plane.
Welcome to Palm Springs in late October.
Once inside the terminal it looked just like any other senior citizen sports bar. All the men I saw were wearing baseball caps, and they had gray hair, no hair, or wore the wig of the week. One man had on a gray wig that made him look like Liberace, if Liberace’s hairdresser had bought him a wig for a head three sizes larger than his was.
The gray, blow dried, wig-wearing man was waiting with another man who was trying to look like a local, and whose wife was picking up both of them. The senior citizen-fake-local was dressed in black short pants, a matching black golf shirt, a black baseball hat with white golf tees stuck to the rim like bullets in a gun belt and knee length black socks. His lily-white knees were crisscrossed with blue vericose veins that separated his black short pants from the black stockings. He was also wearing cross-training athletic shoes, the heels of which lit up with each step he took. Striding alongside both of them was a man in khaki shorts, with legs almost as thin as the uprights for the walker that he had folded up since he was in the lobby. I wondered which of the 109 different Palm Springs golf courses he would be playing. Would he be a guest of a member of the Quarry or would he be opting to play the local nine holes with breakfast or dinner for $75?
Out in front of the airport was a scene from a movie called “Terror in the Parking Lot.” A perfectly made-up lady, who had already outlived her plastic surgeon’s warranty, drove a Mercedes off-road vehicle. She was honking at a convertible Rolls Royce to get out of the way so that she could get closer to the wheelchair passenger pickup area. At the same time, a policeman was writing a ticket for a vintage Triumph convertible that was triple parked in the four-lane road, and the driver was waving fifty-dollar bills at him to get him to stop writing the ticket.
We finally got to our friends with the sun shining outside at a pleasant, comfortable 78 degrees. Lunch was very nice: a designer sandwich made of seven-grain cranberry bread with three kinds of cheese and mesquite-smoked, free-range chicken. It also had jalapeno peppers and sprouts. The free-range chicken was tough enough to have won the last triathlons he entered, before he got run over.
Later that day I relaxed in our friends’ living room, listening to a little classical music, while sipping on a 7-up and munching on potato chips our hostess had placed on the coffee table. About the time I finished my soda, Laurie finished her shower and joined me on the couch. I was complaining to her about the stale potato chips when she all of a sudden got very upset.
“Warren, you’ve just eaten half a bowl of dried rose petals!”
Like I said, welcome to Palm Springs.