Off to Egypt!

image uploaded to latimes.com by Irvine resident

The hills around my office are on fire. Part of a huge firestorm in Southern California. The air is filled with smoke, and close to half a million people have been evacuated from their homes in surrounding areas, but life remains strangely familiar. The dusky sunlight gives an eerie cast to the day, but businesses are open here and people are out doing errands while ash snows down on their heads.

Amid all the confusion and chaos, I am still packing and preparing for a vacation to Egypt. My ordinary life has become surrounded by the remarkable and extraordinary, so the normal anticipation has been turned sideways. I am no longer escaping a normal life and returning to a normal life. The incredible things I’ll see as part of my travels will dovetail with the incredible things I am seeing on television and out my window.

I wonder how this will all fit together in my memories.

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