A Snowball in Hell

It was the summer of 1981 in Taiwan: hot, humid and intolerably oppressive. Overhead storm clouds threatened in the blackening sky as I walked from the plane to the main terminal building. Everything was still; not the slightest breeze stirred anywhere. It was the quiet before the storm. Yet despite the heat and humidity a chill went through me.
My jitters had begun even before the plane’s landing gear had
touched down on the runway. By the time it had come to a standstill, my stomach was doing flip-flops, and even the butterflies down there had the flutters. The important matter was that I had finally made it. My plane had landed at Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport after a series of mishaps that had begun in San Francisco and continued on through Alaska and Hong Kong. My greatest worry at this point was whether or not my adoption lawyer, Mr. Yen, would understand and excuse this delay. I had, of course, wired him from Anchorage, but at that time there was no way to know that the plane would again break down forcing me and the other passengers to lose an entire day and night in Alaska and then another night in Hong Kong.
The night we had spent in Anchorage coincided with the summer solstice and the constant daylight both excited the schoolteacher in me, yet caused me to worry at another delay in my adoption process. We had already broken down in San Francisco and now had waited at the Anchorage airport all day for our plane’s radar to be repaired only to end up being bussed to a hotel for the night. There was no luggage sent by the airline because we were on an international flight so I washed my necessities the best I could. I went to bed at about 10:30 that night in daylight only to wake up in the same daylight at 6:00 the next morning. I did manage to get some sleep despite my anxiety about the lawyer, however, and never found out how many hours it was dark that night.
The next day we landed in my destination Taipei for refueling. Unfortunately that only increased my anxiety because we were not allowed to disembark but had to fly on to Hong Kong to spend another night, something about flight regulations. Having to go on to Hong Kong caused me to miss the last connecting flight back to Taipei bringing me to my final destination several days late.