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might pronounce, sucking on the skinny white cigarette she smoked in the car despite all protests. Then she would dive into an account of her miseries with relish, exuding the triumphant yet embittered air of a field marshal summarizing a battle won after many reversals—the delay in Newark, the gate change at O’Hare.
    As her visit proceeded, others would politely pose the same question, and she would tell her tale again and again. Certain words would float toward me over the hum of conversation at a party or bar: runway, turbulence, layover.
    Later, when I moved to Pennsylvania, she could get almost as much of a nail-biter out of her three-hour drive on the turnpike, fraught as it was with overturned tractor-trailers, inexplicable jams at Bethlehem or Pottsville, mysterious aberrations in the operation of E-Z Pass tollbooths.
    In light of all that, I present this account of a recent trip to Uganda with my mother’s namesake, my daughter Jane. We flew there the day after Christmas to visit our friends Jim and Steve, a writer and a medical researcher. Uganda with a 13-year-old is not everyone’s idea of a great Christmas trip, but it is just the sort of adventurous, stupid thing I love. People could forward me all the scary news stories they wanted; I felt sure we would have a blast.
    Granted, I was a little nervous about our chosen carrier, Ethiopian Airlines. But it turned out it was lovely, and our seatmate on the outgoing trip—a cute, rotund fellow named Tesfaye—made the 12 hours from Dulles to Addis Ababa go by quickly. “Let’s focus on what’s important, Jennie,” he said, urging Jane to turn from identifying world capitals on the seatback monitor to stopping the stewardess so we could get some wine. He showed us videos of his wife and baby and told us how sad it was that we wouldn’t get to spend any time in Addis, apparently the party capital of Africa.
    As soon as we bid him adieu, we learned our flight to Entebbe was delayed; our three-hour layover had become eight. The Addis airport offered chaise longues, duty-free shops, and a lady pouring Ethiopian coffee for clients sitting in a circle on low wooden stools. Soon enough, we had exhausted these delights and went to the gate. We sat. We looked around. We were afflicted with stomach gas (actually, this was just me). We met a retired community college dean from California named Connie, whom we ran into again at the New Year’s Eve party at our safari lodge.
    After a few hours, airline staff herded us to a distant dining room, fed us a complimentary cat-food dinner, then herded us back to board our plane. All in all, we were quite malodorous, worn out, and greasy by the time we arrived in Kampala—but happy to see Jim and Steve and be off on our African adventure, which would include spending New Year’s at said safari lodge.
    Sadly, this is not an essay about rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, thick on the ground as they may have been, so fast forward to the return trip, which took an epic 48 hours, topped only by the storied return of my mother and my son Hayes from France in 2005—remember?—a tale of such tension and drama that it was retold at my mother’s memorial service.
    12:00 noon, January 5: Embark from lodgings at Mutungo Hill, Uganda
    We were traveling home with Jim, who was taking a break from his African year to visit a writers’ colony in New Hampshire. Our driver, Godfrey, got us through Kampala traffic and to the Entebbe airport in record time. 
    1:15 p.m., January 5: Entebbe Airport
    Arriving four hours before our scheduled flight, we immediately learned that it was delayed until 10:00 p.m., which meant we’d miss our connection in Addis. The agent explained that we’d spend the night and the next day in an airport hotel at the airline’s expense—all the cat food you can eat!—and take the Dulles flight the following night. This was bad news for Jim,