After skipping 2005, I visited my friend Ed in Albany this past weekend.

Late Friday and early Saturday, Ed confirmed that he was coming down with something. Apart from a pair of dinners — one Italian and the other Indian — the two of us made a single photography trip. Determined to spend at least an hour outdoors, we walked around Historic Albany.

Several parts of which were indeed aged, if not exactly vintage. By Sunday morning Ed was running a fever, so we stayed inside. He apologized repeatedly for the sedentary and uneventful weekend that had shaped up.

But it was in the mundane that we found the otherworldly.

This has been a typical Ohio summer, thunderstorms passing in reliable succession. Serenity, din, serenity, din, serenity; in that order.

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."

— Philippians 2:5-8

For the last ten years — since the day circumstances forced me to cast off childhood — I have enjoyed seasons with more immediacy when they are a half-year away. By that I mean Yuletide, the first snow, spring's bloom, autumn's turn or torrid summer days can be savored without the distractions and worries of daily living. Caught in the moment, I have only my camera and the best discipline of my will to commit to print and memory the beauty around me as I attend to this or that matter.

This year has delivered quite a yield of trials and passions.

Nevertheless, I wonder, might the season have come when I stand back and admire the Creation — the trees, the flowers, the rocks and the birds — and its forbearing of schemes and quarrels?

Winter has traded places with spring and, for at least the next fortnight, shall stay here. My money is on spring.

En route to San Diego, the elemental landscape below my jet yielded briefly to specks of cities and towns; checkerboard patterns of discreet attempts to work the soil.

The ground again rose.

This time, however, with the lapidescence came a lively viridescence — the thicker the forest, the closer seemed California.

In a moment — from one glance to the next — swaths of terra cotta roofs appeared, white-and-russet neighborhoods cut out of the hillsides.

The openness of San Diego International I found surprising until my party, luggage in hand, waited outside for a shuttle bus — shaded, under palm trees, from the whitest sun I had ever seen. Give an architect one climate and he will design accordingly.

A bus ride marked by stops and starts brought my party to a rental-car outlet that was caught in the unfortunate confluence of demand and managerial incompetence. Was it an hour, ninety minutes, that my father waited in that cordoned, sinuous line? Were the pair of gibbons painted on the facing side of a nearby parking garage the only hope for distraction I would have become very impatient, indeed. But the buildings I noticed beneath the jet during the last seconds of final approach were in the very place I was standing.

Every five minutes or so, a plane would land.

And they passed low.

Very low.

Very, very low. A passenger jet with the old, deafeningly loud cigar-shaped nacelles is a rare sight today; for all the fuss made by old residenters in the council chambers of every city sitting nearby an airport, modern commercial aircraft glide by with a whisper, betraying a sort of aeronautical recidivism only when the wind carries the roar of reversed engines. But at a few hundred feet, here, just off the end of San Diego International Airport's Runway 27, every plane could help an observer tell the difference between a local and a tourist.

This evening was the first of the year I spent half an hour walking; beauty was seen and peace of mind attained. Would that it all stay that way.

Will the reader who a) lives in San Francisco, b) faithfully visiting my website through c) Firefox on a d) Macintosh computer please identify himself or herself? You may e-mail me here. I am simply curious. As an incentive, your loyalty shall be rewarded tomorrow with new content (yes, I have been occupied and have rather gotten behind).

Thunder in the distance? It was quiescence, not etiolation, that had left flora and fauna in arrest. Birds chirped and earth cracked open green. Winter took one step back, then another, and another.

September 24, 2005, was the wedding date chosen by my cousin Francis and his bride-to-be. The location: Mary, Star of the Sea, a modest parish in La Jolla, California. Any point west of Chicago is an unlikely place to find me — the other side of the country, you say? This was to be the longest jet flight I had ever taken, soaring above terrain of which I could conceive as depicted in a book — but not before my own eyes.

As with my trip to Williamsburg for Thanksgiving of 2004, departure from Cleveland-Hopkins International was an act of extrication from sullen rain clouds. Aloft, the jet's wings trembled slightly and though after several minutes I could accept the gentle sway as a natural consequence of operation I occupied myself, for added comfort, with photographing the sky's diametric landscape.

Approaching O'Hare International, the return from the empyrean to terra was disenchanting: there lay Chicago, left, beneath an overcast sky, grey and flat and dull. Though salient, the downtown spires were so miniaturized they evoked incredulity. The squares upon squares of residential blocks and industrial buildings were solid, and believable, and boring.

As if in answer to the awkward introduction, the airport itself unfolded a dozen ready fascinations. I said to my mother and father as we walked, several times, I recall, that I simply loved O'Hare International. Was it the decorative arches? Or the bustle of so many different faces? The television screens, the shops, the profusion of lives and stories here working in quiet, subtle concert?

After a brief lunch, my party moved to our departure gate where, one jet over, a massive widebody was fueling for a return trip to Japan. Dominating the rotunda were Japanese of all ages — families, couples, singles. One fellow took turns wearing a cowboy hat with his companion before she, satisfied with one particular look, let him keep it on. A young man calmly checked his e-mail on a laptop while a young woman typed a letter from a few seats away. Destination considered, boarding announcements were bilingual, an American man trading the microphone with an older Japanese woman. The canon made for an odd pair of messages conveyed — measured English athwart strident, insistent Japanese.

Not long after the passengers for the Tokyo flight vanished in the mouth of a docking tunnel, we walked through our own passage to a 737 bound for San Diego.

As the clouds broke I noticed how the forests had dwindled.

I hadn't much time to think on that before the sky reclaimed my attention.

My party contented itself with conversation, reading, sleep and a candid photograph or two.

Accompanying us westward was the finest elixir, indeed.

Clouds pushed and pulled by wind tore, shredded, twisted — they piled atop one another and raced towards the horizon.

The moon hung low, early; there, stark against lapis lazuli, as if to watch.

One could hardly be blamed for staring at the contradiction: a vaporous allure that was, to the eye, amaranthine.

An hour passed. The ground turned unfamiliar, then peculiar. Trees followed water sources, austerity against Ohio Valley extravagance.

Mountains thrust through stray cumulus.

The earth below changed from peculiar to alien.

Smoke from below was a desperate, obstreperous report of man's habitation.

Nature abided the intrusion.

I may as well have fished my ticket out from my bag to ensure that I was traveling to San Diego, California instead of Noctis Labyrinthus, Planet Mars. San Diego it was to be.