Free Landing by Emma Donoghue Page B

that's what MBA means) I'm posting you some Irish truffles, since North American chocolate doesn't deserve the name.
    "Rug muncher" is a new one on me, but after several minutes of reflection I believe I've worked it out! I still maintain that small towns are creepy, but mercifully you don't come across like a smalltown girl; all those childhood years browsing in the adult section of the library must explain it, I suppose.
    Got your last e-mail in my hotel in Boston--I'm deeply flattered that I've caused this quantum shift from post to e-mail, can I tempt you to move on to Instant Messaging next?--or texting if you'd only get a mobile...
    Yes, Kathleen = girlfriend as in partner not as in female friend, sorry. (I mean sorry for the confusion.) Our two Englishes only pretend to be the same language! The one that always confuses me is "mad,"--when an American tells me he's mad I visualize a straitjacket.
    Right now I'm in the crew lounge at Dublin Airport. No, my movements are not like "the random firing of electrons," since you ask, they're as highly structured as a monk's. Four days on, three off, and we bid for our schedules in strict order of seniority. Luckily few are as senior as me because so many have switched to jobs on the ground, and a third of my unlucky colleagues have been given the heave in recent years. Our airline used to be classy, but always on the brink of bankruptcy, so after 9/11 it had to reinvent itself as lean and mean, a.k.a. cheap and nasty.
    Still: flying's in my blood, because I was born at 30,000 feet. My Amma--who'd been an air hostess herself--insisted Da take her for a last-minute visit to her parents in Cochin. (High-caste communists, a funny combo.) She was more than eight months on, but the rules weren't as strict in the sixties, and on the way home to Dublin she suddenly had me in the aisle!
    You ask how I "stay so charming all the time" during flights--well, I fake it. I've never quite expoded and screamed "Yiz are all a shower of bitches and bastards" (as folklore has it a former colleague once did) but I've come close. Ah no, the truth is a flight attendant has to basically like people or the job would start draining her like a vampire on day one. Speaking of which, time to go through security...

    Re: slurs on "Frozen North"
    Síle, I just checked an atlas and I'll have you know that Ireland, Ont., is ten degrees further SOUTH than Dublin. I admit the snowbanks are still hip-high but the sun's dazzling.
    So, a partner as well as a house; you sound pretty settled to me, for all your talk of freedom...
    Re: the museum, it's a lovely 1862 schoolhouse; when the town tried to flog it to a sinister Heritage Village, a bunch of us formed a protest committee. Persuaded an old farmer called Jim McVaddy to donate his priceless Canadiana on condition the town handed over the schoolhouse for a museum--and then managed to beg start-up money from a private foundation. Since I was just about the only one under retirement age (and I'd been interning at a Children's Pioneer Museum half an hour away while doing my BA in the evenings), I wangled the one paid job. In year five, Backroads and Byways magazine has hailed us as "one of the more charmingly maverick little museums in Ontario"(!).
    I just had a turkey sub with Rizla. The garage/ café is run by the Leungs: see, this area is not entirely populated by the "Waspy pioneers" of your imagination. Gong Leung goes into Cantonese whenever she's bitching about the customers. Their daughter Diana looks totally Canadian and it occurs to me it's because she wears braces. My friend Gwen always says you can tell a Brit (meaning, from your islands) by the bad teeth, but I've assured her that yours are extremely white and even.

    Re: Quakers
    I keep picturing you in a gray Victorian bonnet, Jude, it's unnerving. But the Quaker thing does help explain your purist oddities. I love the way you say "We built our Meetinghouse at Coldstream in 1859" as if you were