): Sweet Sorrow :(

Airports used to be in my blood.  We were always flying free, my family – to see the Missouri grandmothers, to have our teeth done in Chicago (my dentist uncle), eventually, to visit Paris when I was fourteen.  I used to love flying.  But when my dad left TWA to build a major southern airport, I lost my free ticket.  And my casual jump-on-plane travel-may-care.

Not that traveling had been without stress.  When you’re a stand-by baby, you get yourself all wound up – sometimes for nothing.  You can spend hours at the airport waiting for a flight.  I remember one time, so tired, so repeatedly disappointed – when they announced the closing of the flight, I spun around and sobbed into my mother’s skirt.

But I was never more comfortable, more relaxed than when I was curled up in the seat of a plane, dozing to the lovely drone of the engines. Until the day when I was strapping myself into my now paid-for visited seat, headed home from grad school for Christmas: I sighed with contentment, in my element, looked down at the floor and noticed the huge, beefy bolt heads, fastening the seats in front of me to the floor.  I was flooded with affection and trust and thought, “Look how solid this plane is.  Those seats are bolted right down – into a floor – – that’s suspended 30,000 feet in the air with utterly no visible means of support.”

And that was the end of my love-affair with the air.

Then one day, I raced to the airport in my little Volkswagen, only to see my plane take off while I was still looking for parking.

Going to the airport became a study in panic from that time on.  Nerves.  Worry.

And now this.

These people.

Going away.

(five o’clock in the morning.  too early for flash.  too early for anything.)

How do you walk a beloved child into a terminal and leave her at entrance to  the security line?  You look at each other, feeling the spirit behind your eyes pressing, pressing against the walls that keep us so humanly separate. All we are left with are words and the quick embrace – helpless to frame the pain that stretching this connection will cost.

I’m no so hot about airports anymore.