Welcome to Nashville

When your seat is in Row 6, and you’re not in first class, question the size of the airplane. Ours was small, about 20 rows of seats, a single seat on one side of the aisle, and then two seats on the other. That’s all right for a 15-minute ride to Nantucket, but a two-hour plane ride? Sounds like a long time to keep a small plane in the air. I wasn’t going to tell my son I was scared. I didn’t want to make him fearful. Turns out I didn’t have to. The young man sitting next to us in the airport waiting area did it for me.

“Is that really our plane? That small one?” the man said, pointing a trembling finger out the window.

I nodded, trying not to commiserate. But the man then needed help figuring out when to get up for boarding, where to leave his carry-on bag, and how to put the tag on his suitcase, making it easier for me to see his anxiety was excessive and perhaps I didn’t need to think that just because a plane is small , it will fall out of the sky.

The flight attendant was coiffed but weathered, as they often are, and she had a slight Southern accent, which appealed to me. Apparently, my accent appealed to her, too. When she caught me with my seat belt off – I told her I needed to get something in the overhead bin – she said, “Well, now you owe me a glass of wine.” Trying to get into the Southern spirit, I said, “Wine! I’ll get you bourbon!” Halfway through the flight, she slipped a napkin into my hand in which was hidden a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels.

When we arrived in Nashville, we followed signs to Ground Transportation. I didn’t want to rent a car. I didn’t think we needed it, and I like public transportation. Once outside the terminal, I headed toward signs that said, “Ride Sharing,” figuring we could share a cab ride into town to defray the cost.

“Are you going downtown,” I asked a young woman waiting by the curb.

“I’m going to a friend’s house. Download Uber,” she said. She grabbed my phone, pulled up the app for me from the App Store and ran off to get the car waiting for her.

I figured I’d download it later. For now, I wanted to share a ride into town. I asked a woman approaching the ride share area if she was going downtown.

“I don’t know,” she said and rattled off some destination I hadn’t heard of.

A third woman scurried off before I could inquire.

I looked at my son. I’ve done enough traveling to know there’s always an adjustment period when you arrive in a new city. When my husband and I traveled around Europe, we would get into an argument every time we arrived in a new place, from the stress of finding somewhere to sleep and eat. My strongest memory of Berlin is walking a few steps ahead of him, my heavy backpack on my back, turning around and screaming something at him at the top of my lungs, giving him the finger and then stomping off. At this moment, I was with my seven-year-old son, who was looking at me for direction.

It was quickly becoming clear that “Ride Sharing” wasn’t a place to share a ride. It was a spot one waits for car services like Uber and Lyfts, services that as a 50-something suburbanite with a car, I have not had to use. Now, I wanted to finish downloading the app, but cell service was too spotty. I’d heard there was a shuttle that ran a circuit by all the downtown hotels and asked a police officer where I might find it, but it didn’t seem to exist. He walked me over to an information booth. All the while, my son followed close behind, trailing his wheeled suitcase like a dog on a leash.

The man in the information booth got me a WiFi connection and downloaded the app. I felt like an octogenarian who writes emails in ALL CAPS. He set me up with the app, a car came, my son and I got in, and we set off for the hotel, with me now firmly planted in the 21st century.

The hotel was beautiful. The lobby had 20-foot ceilings with stained glass panels, marble columns, brass railings, little palm trees in planters and a fireplace that was lit. A dozen hotel employees were scurrying about preparing the room for the Easter brunch the next morning – rolling up the rug, setting up the tables with silver chafing dishes and wood bunnies holding placards that said, “Happy Easter.”

Our room was equally opulent: Louis XIV-looking furniture, a sitting area with puffy chairs and an ottoman, a marble bathroom with a tub and shower. I saw a TV remote and channel guide on the sink and looked around for the television but saw none. I figured someone left the remote in the bathroom. Turns out the screen was in the mirror.

We dressed for dinner, which was a Seder at the home of a fellow writer whom I’d never met but had seen online for years in my various writer association forums. I looked her up when I knew we were going to Nashville. I called an Uber – I was now a pro — and as the car drove farther and farther from the downtown, I hoped I’d written the address down properly.

As I rang the bell, I saw two buckets of red water on the porch, and I feared it was for dying Easter eggs and that we were at the wrong house, but I later learned it represented the Red Sea parting, and we were supposed to walk between the two tubs.

The Seder table was set in front of a bank of large windows overlooking the Cumberland River. The Grand Ole Opry House was just on the other side. Soon, the guests arrived, and we began the service, with Jews from Boise, Idaho; San Antonio, Texas; and Long Island, all of whom now lived in Nashville. The book from which we all read, the Haggadah, was actually written by a woman I knew from New Jersey. As we went around the table reading the passages of the Seder I’ve known since childhood — the wise son, the simple son, the four questions, and Dayenu — the traffic across the river outside of the Grand Ole Opry began to build until it was just a line of headlights that weren’t moving. And it made me think that no matter where you are in the world, from the cliffs of California to the beaches on the Atlantic, one will find Jews – and traffic.