Apparently Cleveland stinks. If you’re from Cleveland I apologize, I actually really loved Ohio, but I couldn’t believe my luck, or lack of it, in regards to my ability upon landing in your fair city to walk into a car or home without wanting to run for an eye wash station. Air fresheners. Many many kinds met us at every turn. They used the Glade kind. Ya, know the ones you plug-in so that the smell is propelled by electricity to continuously waft through the room and stick to every part of you, especially your eyeballs, leaving you with a popping itching stinging sensation under your eyelids and wondering how you can escape but you can’t because IT’S IN THE AIR.
It started with the rental car which smelled like a teenage boy’s locker axe cologne collection. Strong. And I’ll share the smell never lessened during our whole trip, we were determined to find the source of it in the car; ya know a tin can or new car smell tree under the seat or something which we could throw out at the nearest gas station…but nope, nothing. I am sure it was just doused, poured over the seats with glee and a thought of this’ll do it! We drove with the windows down…a lot.
This was followed by our airbnb which had five DOUBLE Glade plug-ins. I’ve never seen double plug-ins and my first thought was lordy lord lord what stench are they trying to cover up?? The home was actually lovely but from the moment we stepped thru the door (at 1AM mind you) we wanted to rip our faces off. After we had opened all the windows, found all the plug-ins and hidden them under the sink we realized there was another problem. At first I thought it was febreeze that had been sprayed over all the bedding. But I realized the next day that they washed all the bedding with 3 in 1 Gain. Three perfumes in one folks. Because ya know, your bedding needs strong odor removers, perfumes and boosting? The back had warnings like don’t hold this pack in your hand, don’t leave it out anywhere because if your child or pet should lick it, it will burst, and they will die. Don’t touch it basically but please wash your stuff in it and then lay your body down on it. This will irritate your eyes but don’t be afraid to put your head down on a pillow which has been drenched in it. It. was. awful. It ended with me fantasizing about sleeping in the bath tub, getting a hotel and actually thinking sentimentally about the axe smelling car ride over. Eventually, like the desperate crazy people we were we ended up purchasing new sheets and pillows so that we could sleep without wanting to remove the inner lining of our noses and throats. Even this didn’t work completely as the smell was so strong that the comforters, if they touched you, left you marked with the scent, so that as you got up to go get a drink of water in the middle of the night you thought to yourself how is the smell still with me? I’m not in the bed anymore and then you smelled your hands and realized you’d touched the quilt and it was all over you now. It followed me everywhere I went, like it’s namesake, the moonlight breeze…
But I digress. We had a long day leading up to the Cleveland air freshener incident of 2023. After leaving our house at 8am to head into Los Angeles, with my daughter, for what would be an almost two hour drive because ya know it’s the morning and that’s what morning traffic looks like around here, we arrived at Cedar Sinai and navigated a series of appointments until we were ejected exhausted from the hospital just around lunch time. I had thought we’d go see a friend, go to the beach or a museum afterwards to kill time until our flight but again looking at traffic I realized we’d probably need to eat, and then make our way to LAX or we’d be stressing, rushing, and I’d be regretting. That’s what traffic around here does to you. It makes you regret things.
So we hopped over to The Grove Farmer’s Market to grab lunch. My daughter had never seen this spectacle of a mall and I hadn’t been in years. I used to live off Fairfax up in West Hollywood so for a time and I would eat at Charlie’s for breakfast (the best corn beef hash), and see a lot of movies there. I used to work in television and on the days you weren’t working you were so utterly exhausted, a shell of a human being really, that all you could do was walk around like a zombie, eat things, and maybe watch a few movies until the next job; just trying to recover your humanity. Once as I was heading to see a matinee and as I was floating down on the escalator I heard the yelps of a little dog which had gotten it’s toes stuck in the escalator going up. It was one of those little toy dogs and it’s owner was wearing very high heels and could barely lean over to help the poor creature, and kept yelling for someone to help her, not that anyone would know what to do…yank? It was awful. And now EVERY TIME I go on an escalator I think of that dog. Sorry to share that here. Now you will also perhaps think of it. But you won’t have the sounds in your head so there’s that. In case you haven’t been to The Grove, the apple store there now looks like a cathedral (I had a picture but had to make space on my drive and accidentally deleted it). They put actual trees inside it to make it seem natural? It made me sad. We looked for Rainn Wilson’s new book Soul Boom but the Barnes and Noble was remodeling and so no one could find ANYTHING, nor were they interested in trying to, so we left with a new journal for my daughter and a card game called dragon tea time for the plane (which we never opened on our trip). She did journal on the trip though, in the car, like the freaking angel that she is.
We had enchiladas for lunch and afterwards my daughter said matter of factly that she didn’t want to order off the kid menu anymore because the real menu was where all the good food was - she ate more than half my enchiladas and she wasn’t wrong.
It was 1 o’clock, we’d already been traveling since 8am, part of which involved testing at a large hospital, but our journey was really just getting started. As we started making our way to LAX and found the long term parking lot, the shuttle, and then finally the spirit terminal we were still in good spirits. That is until as I was self-checking in I realized they (Spriti) has decided that 40 pounds is the new cutoff for a checked bag or they charge you something like $130 bucks to check your bag. Folks, I’m used to the overage poundage being closer to 60 lbs and so I had packed according to this poundage. We had brought one suitcase for the both of us and we were four pounds over. Not bad right 44 pounds for two ladies going away for four days but now these extra four pounds of things were moved into my bulging purse and my daughters backpack. I gleefully breathed a sigh of relief at not having to pay the additional $130 for one bag but breathed an equally defeated sigh at the thought of schlepping our ginormous bags around; which now had no room for anything else and made us look like we were backpacking.
I was looking forward to sitting down and removing some of things on the plane but upon sitting down in our seats quickly realized with confusion that spirit has decided they can save money by removing the little nets from behind the seats?! removing your ability to put anything within reach that might make the flight more tolerable, enjoyable, less Kafkaesque?
Instead you have to put all your things under your seat but there is so little room that you can’t really and when you try to bend over to grab anything, you have to move your body at an angle to the side (code; into the person next to you), then your head smashes a bit into the chair in front of you, because you’re trying to avoid your neighbors personal space, your finger tips grasping for the $9 bottle of water that you now have no where to put, except between your legs. This was how the flight went. Do I recommend flying Spirit airlines? No, No I don’t.
We arrived in Cleveland around 11:30pm and I sent our Turo driver a text. I had a strange experience trying to get a rental car…where in there simply weren’t any. They were doing construction in the rental car terminal and so there were only a half dozen cars available and they were triple the price of a normal rental. I didn’t want to pay $200 bucks a day to drive a Nissan Sentra around so I had gone the Turo route which is usually fine as they just drive and drop the vehicle and you pick it up. But this driver had wanted to meet us, I guess to avoid the parking fees at the airport, and then wasn’t responding to my chats and it was midnight. I was exhausted and feeling a very real panic is my stomach and dread at the thought of trying to get a taxi from the Cleveland airport to Lake Avon, at midnight, with my kid but I told myself I’m going to just assume it will work out. This was hard for me. I usually assume things are going to go badly. My father’s favorite law was murphys.
And so when I had texted the driver and it had been twenty minutes and no answer, my gut instinct wast to call Turo for help. You’ll be proud to know that all my spiritual practice is paying off, seriously it is a spiritual practice to wait when things are going wrong after a long day and just observe. I whispered to myself my kabbalah mantras, what a pleasure (this is teaching me something) and the hardest one (the one that implies this is all for my greater good) certainty. I waited. I refrained. and then voila! He texted photos of the car and where he parked it. We made our way up the escalator to the parking area. I thought of the small dog screaming over it’s lost toe. And then as I got to the top of the escalator I saw DIFFERENT directions for TWO parking lots; an orange one and a green one. I texted my driver to ask which one as he hadn’t mentioned ANY colors. I look up and my driver is standing in front me asking are you Sarah? Relief. Relief. Spiritual practice paying off. He say’s i’ll just take you to the car. Yes!!! I’m being rewarded for refraining I think as he walks us over and I realize there is no way I would have found the car otherwise. And then I get in the car and take a breath and think…why does it smell like a teenage boy in here? dammit, not rewarded.
All the perfume bombs aside. It was mother’s day weekend and I was with my kid and we were adventuring. Ohio was gorgeous. We explored. We saw Lake Erie which looks like an Ocean. We looked at farms. We hiked. We fed a Giraffe. We went to a play downtown, a library, and a bookshop (where I still couldn’t find Rainn Wilson’s new book). All in all it felt good to be out and about even if I would intermittently, all throughout the day, find myself sniffing myself and the air around me in disbelief and sadness, wondering how long it would take for me to lose this damn scent…whispering what a pleasure to myself.
A long time it turns it out.
As a surprise, my kiddo had hand sewn a beautiful banner and when I woke up mother’s day morning, trying not to touch my face, but really wanting to rub my eyes, I saw she had hung it from the light fixture above our bed. Now, when we packed up and left Cleveland at 3AM that following Monday morning we accidentally left it hanging on the light fixture above the bed. The airbnb host was very accommodating and offered to mail it back to us. I had also shared about the toxic fume bath we had endured just letting him know that for sensitive folks it might behove him to tone it down a bit in the perfumery department but that we loved his home. He was very kind and apologetic. And three to five working days later we walked to the mailbox to retrieve the banner from it’s bubble envelope. We opened it up on the couch and were instantly met with itching and watering eyes. Staring at it in disbelief we noticed it appeared to have been washed and ironed.
Apparently their caretaker didn’t get the memo about our debacle and had thoughtfully washed and ironed the banner before mailing it. It followed us home. And I laughed. I thought incredulously about writing the airbnb host (certainly this couldn’t be on purpose? certainly not, said the universe with a wry smile). I grabbed a pair of tongs, put the banner in the washing machine, and I refrained. I was practicing.
Oh heck! You both went through quite an adventure! At least there was a giraffe involved.