Flying Day

I can remember when the now-sprawling Atlanta airport was one building.  When we were about 12,  Patsy's daddy parked in front of it so we could watch the planes taking off and landing, one at a time, with long spaces between. 

I remember, years later, the sight of my parents' happy faces at the gate--the actual gate!--when I arrived from Texas. Arrivals were so exciting, departures so sad. When the Georgia visit was over, too soon, we sat in the gate area together dreading saying good-bye.

Once, when Little Girl Day was flying home from Nana's house alone, Carlene remembers her asking, "Nana, will you listen for me?"--so she wouldn't miss the announcement to board her plane. 

Yesterday, in the multi-terminal airport, I felt like a relic of another century! After a very long line at security, I sat at Gate C22 eating my Atlanta Bread croissant. There were no festive arrivals.  Many of the travelers were plugged in to earphones and most of them looked serious, efficient, and exhausted. 

Carlene and I got up at five yesterday morning, drove through the "parking lot" that is Interstate 85 traffic, then got to the MARTA train station by seven, still sobered by yesterday's news of the shootings in San Bernardino.  I remember driving through that city in the mountains of Southern California two years ago, how peaceful it was--and now the news is dominated with yet another terrible mass shooting there.   

Although I don't always take the train to the airport, I've taken it often enough.  Yet the space between trips is long enough that I never quite remember how to use the ticket vending machine.  Younger, more mass-transit-savvy travelers walk up to the machine, insert cards, tap here, punch there, and walk away with their Breeze cards, easy easy.

I was stymied by the machine and I had to ask for help from a traveler standing nearby.  I felt inept, ridiculous, klutzy--and old.  Carlene tried to help me carry one of my bags into the station and wound up inside on my Breeze tap while I stood outside, gate snapped shut.  A kind passenger exiting the gate helped me re-load my card and someone else let Carlene out.  Gates only allow one passenger per tap, we learned. 

We said good-bye, then I tried to balance my two suitcases and carry-on to get on the escalator. Luckily,  I mounted without dropping anything, and I stepped onto the southbound train a nanosecond before it lurched on the tracks and departed. 

I found a seat—not the one reserved for seniors with three bags (those were taken up by twenty-somethings listening to music on their phones), and I managed hang on to my  bags in the aisle while the train raced through Atlanta.  All the while, I felt out of it, like a little old lady who didn't know beans about what to all the other riders was second nature. 

I made it through Marta and the packed Plane Train and security, shoes off, laptop in its separate bin, but it took me a while to get over feeling rattled by my ineptitude with the  Breeze machine.

The world has grown too fast, too packed, too dangerous, I thought--remembering the events of yesterday in California. Travelers seem isolated in their own heads, and I, too, feel isolated. I keep hearing the words, "high alert," and I'm noting the difference between today's wariness and the sense of expectancy and connectedness we used to feel among other travelers at airports.

But then I thought of the people I was leaving and the people I was on my way to see and the caring stranger at the train station.  I sat for a while and remembered how connected I am to so many people.  I was glad Kate was coming to pick me up.

On the plane, I found a seat between a woman and her husband.  Her face was all-over bruised and the skin on her tiny hands was paper-thin.  We talked cheerfully throughout the flight--mostly about children, grandchildren, and books.  While I never learned for sure, I suspected that she was ill.

Her husband--a retired doctor--was caring and sweet and on his way to run a marathon in San Antonio.  After returning from the bathroom, the wife caught the thin skin of her hand in the seat belt latch and her husband reached across me to release it, but a large blue bruise formed instantly.  "I bruise easy," she told me.

Later, standing in the bathroom line with her husband, the flight attendant asked us if we could remember who'd written and sung "Sandman, Bring me A Dream," but neither of us could.   "Do you like running?" I asked him.

He shook his head.  "I just needed to get out of the house," he said, grinning.  "I had too many opinions about how she should run the house and she told me to get out of the house and do something, so I decided to run.  That was four years ago.  I was 72."

Back at our seats, we listened as the flight attendant sang "Sandman" on the speakers--changing the words to make it about Southwest Airlines.  Then she announced that the man in 11 B had a birthday.  She turned off all the lights and asked us to turn on our call lights (LED candles) as we sang Happy Birthday.  Suddenly the cabin in the sky was like a flying birthday cake!

The flight attendant put a crown on the birthday man's head and he blew--and we all turned off our call lights together, flames out.

The marathon runner helped his fragile wife down the aisle, carrying both his bags and hers.  The birthday man disappeared into the crowd. I texted Kate that I'd landed.

We all dispersed after baggage claim, leaving the parenthesis of air travel and returning to our own stories on the patch of ground we know.