There are two places where I always end up feeling nervous and small.  One is the airport.  When I was young, my dad worked for TWA, and we’d always fly standby – free to see my grandmother, cousins.  The catch with standby is that you rush and bustle to get there on time, and then you wait, and you wait – while all the time other people are getting on the plane.  And at the last possible moment, they tell you they’re one seat short for your party and you can’t go.  Then you try again, later.  And maybe again even later.

 That, and the fact that I actually missed a flight once.  Just didn’t get there in time.  That was in college.  Back when I was really, really practical minded and responsible.

But part of the trouble is that I am always bewildered there.  Bewildered by time and by space.  Could it really already be time for them to go?  For me to go?  And how is it possible that I can, in just a few hours, find myself in a totally different world? Or that I can stand it, watching at the rail—watching my children make their way away from me through security, already on their way back to what is now their real lives?  How do we not run howling after them – it’s all a mistake: they were supposed to grow up, but not that far up.

And then there is the nature of the place itself—loud, chaotic.  Lines.  Wrong lines.  Wrong answers.  Arcane kiosks that may or may not work.  It is like a conjunction of the oddest lines of energy in the universe, and all physics are off.  As is all logic.  Many of the people who work there have forgotten this, have adapted the new chaos as normality and do not get why you do not get it yourself.  They need to be more patient.  And explain themselves more clearly.

It is not as fun to ride the moving sidewalk when you have just left your child and grandchild behind, having watched them as long as you could—begging a glimpse of that pink shirt through the crowds of shoeless tray-pushing passengers.  Feeling guilty because you know that all you really doing is making them look back over and over, waving so that you won’t feel abandoned.  Guilty, but still unable to just go away and leave them to their business.  Just in case.  Just in case they need you – like if they did need you, you could just leap those barriers and push everybody aside to get to them – without ending up in federal prison.

It is not as fun to ride the moving sidewalk when your chest feels heavy and your eyes are swimmy and you feel like an idiot, because you are, after-all a grownup, are you not?  And this is just life. 

But the sidewalk really needs you to be pulling a wheeled bag to deliver a real ride.  You moving like wing-heeled Mars, pulling that bag that hits every seam in the sidewalk with wonderful rhythm.  A bag assumes that you are going somewhere.  Or coming home from somewhere.  And with one, I have been known to ride the sidewalk going both ways, five times in a row, just for the fun of it. 

But when you are empty handed, the charm is gone.

At the very end of the sidewalk there is a – I don’t know what it is.  A metal panel set into the wall with machinery inside.  On the panel it says, “Pre-paid Parking.”  And it has a couple of slots and lines of buttons and a little readout screen.  There are actually two of these panels, a tall one at the end of the sidewalk and a short one a few feet away, short – as if it were the kids’ version.

Perhaps I should have gone for the kids’ version.  I stood in front of the adult one, reading the directions.  As much as I ever read directions: it’s like, yeah – okay, I get that – got the concept – just tell me which way to feed the card in, already.

 So, as instructed in step one, I stuck the card I’d won at the entrance of the parking garage into the slot.  It was a lousy, boring little cardboard card.  I’d like it so much better if they gave you gold rings instead.  The way they used to do with Merry-Go-Rounds. Or at least, I think they used to do that.  In a more charming world.  Gold rings with computer chips inside of them or something, they could give you now.   But all you get is this little cardstock thing that looks like nothing and that you don’t dare lose for anything.  And that’s what I fed into the slot.  As per direction.  Face up. 

The panel sucked in the card.  And two dollars (TWO DOLLARS???) flashed on the readout.  Yeah, I must have exceeded my free half an hour by a good seventeen seconds.  Next direction – feed in your credit card.  Face up.  And I did that.  And the credit card came right back out.  Easy-peasy. Next direction, push button for receipt.  I pretty much understood that to be just like the machines at the gas station – if you want a receipt, push the button.  Not necessary.  So I turned away without pushing the button. But then it struck me – how was I supposed to prove that I had paid – you know, when you get to all those little gates at the edge of the airport?

(tense modulation warning)

So I jump back to the machine and push the button. Only it turns out to be the wrong button.  It’s the Need Assistance button instead, and suddenly, this terrible loud pulsing sound fills the entire terminal.  I jump back and scanned the directions again. Then I realize that there is also a line of blue buttons, low profile, looking pretty much like decorative polka dots, down the side of the readout.  So I push the one opposite the word “receipt” on the screen (yeah – you woulda had to have looked twice yourself).  And then push it again.  And again.

All this time, the terrible loud pulsing sound is still loud and still pulsing.  And I am cringing, looking apologetically over my shoulder at nobody.  Happily, I seemed to have hit the airport at a really, really slow time.  Of course, I can’t leave.  I do not yet have the receipt.  Because it isn’t coming out of the panel.  I check every possible ejection point.  And the sound is pounding on and on and nobody is coming to assist.  Next to that panel there is the old window, kind of like a niggardly version of a movie ticket office window, where the disgusted woman with the fancy fingernails used to sit and dispense spleen along with receipts.  But that window is now dark and deserted.  And still I stand there, wondering when the spotlights will start flashing on me in time with the terrible sound.

Finally, there is a crackle, and I realize there is a sort of speaker screen in the panel.  And a voice.  A woman’s voice.  And—I am not making any of this up—she speaks in an Indian accent.  For a wild moment, I wonder if this panel is wired to a Satellite and I am actually talking to the customer support center of Mumbi.

“What is the problem?” she says, sounding tired.

I explain that it will not give me a receipt.  And now I am thinking it’s a good thing I hit the wrong button first, seeing how long it took to get anybody to answer, and also seeing that I actually was going to need assistance to get out of there.  Unless I caused the problem by hitting the wrong button in the first place.  Would the Need Assistance button be somehow connected to the receipt printer?  Or was the receipt printer actually located in Mumbi?

“You have not gotten your receipt?”

“No.”

“Have you checked at the bottom?”  She sounds very tired at this point, and I am relieved to be able to say that I had, actually, checked the hole at the bottom, which looked like something that was built to return change.

“Has the receipt come yet?”

“No.  Not yet.”

“Have you gotten your card back?”

“My visa came right out.”

“Your card.  Your card.  Did it come back out?”

And then I realize that the not-gold-ring card was supposed to be my proof.  That it was supposed to have come back out of the slot at some point.  But had not.  Has not. And I say as much.

“Ah,” she says.  And suddenly the readout changes.  It turns an angry yellow with white words that said, “This station is decommissioned,” or something like that.  And then the parking card comes shoots out of the slot.  I had not looked at it when I fed it in; I do not know what it’s supposed to look like when it comes out.

“Take that to the pre-paid gate,” she saus.  And looking back, I’m guessing the loud sound, at that point, stopped.

I have a hard time finding my car now.  Since I bought a new old one last week.  Or week before.  It’s all running together for me now.  My old car, which is now M’s new car, or will be as soon as he gets back from his mission (an amount of time that really doesn’t have much “soon” about it), unless the valve covers blow up, which they sound like they are trying to do.  I drive that car to the barn now, so that I will have a grown-up, civilized car with which I can transport people who do not know and will not, from this car, guess that I am actually a terrible slob.  My Sienna is dark green and has a bike rack on it, an expensive, very cool bike rack that is unfortunately locked tight; nobody remembers who has the key.  I could find that car in any lot at any time.

The new, civilized car is a very pretty seven year old silver Toyota Highlander.  Which looks like every other funky, chunky, silver fake SUV out there of any brand.  I can tell which is mine by the fact that there is no license plate on it yet.  I don’t know what I will do once the plates come.

(return to former tense)

By this time, the sadness had morphed into weariness.  I drove through the parking garage – I hate parking garages and know that someday I will get lost in one and just die there, the car still inching along till it runs into a cement wall – and out through the maze of miles of little roads that spills into this sudden huge sea of asphalt where there are about twelve lanes, each one heading for the toll gates.  The place was completely empty.  I drove to the far right, the PRE PAID gate, pulled carefully up beside another panel and fed in my not-gold-ring card.

It came right back out.  “This card is illegible or something the heck else is wrong with it,” the readout said.  So I found the Need Assistance button on that panel and, in a much shorter period of time, and without the pulsing sound, was addressed by the exact same tired Indian woman.  She did not say, “What’s wrong NOW?”  But I know that’s what she meant.  I explained that I was the same annoying person and that the panel would not accept the card.

“Back up,” she said.  And pull into the Cash line.  The very furthest left.”  And that was the highlight of my day, driving sideways across twelve empty lanes.  I don’t know why it was so exhilarating.  A kind of damn-the-torpedoes moment, fecklessly jamming it across all those solid lines.

The Indian woman was not in Mumbi.  She was behind the CASH window.  And when she smiled, she did not look as tired as she had sounded.  She took my card, looked at it, then showed it to me—as though I should be able to see something significant about it.

“It has not been paid,” she said.  Ah.  Yes.  How stupid of me not to have seen that.  ANYBODY would have seen that.

“But it took my card,” I said patiently.

“But it has not been paid,” she said, pointing to a place on the card where I must assume, if it had been paid, there would have been very large letters saying so.

I gave her my Visa.  She ran it.  We’ll see how many times I have actually paid that two dollars.  But only when I can work up the energy to face my money after this three weeks of my out-of-town-family-revolving-door policy.

I told her I thought her accent was charming. I meant it, but she did not smile at me again after I said it.

Then all I had to do was drive home.

And remember.

I had actually been fine at the airport, entertaining Max, lugging bags.  Until we got to security and couldn’t put off the goodbyes any longer.  I was a little surprised at the tears, springing generously forth as I put my arms around my oldest baby, saying goodbye again.  Again.  Again.  I stiff-upper-lipped it, but the eyes couldn’t turn off. 

Gin and Max walked away down the aisle to the little ID check point, where, after the paperwork had all been checked, they turned again and waved.  And then Max saw my brimming eyes. 

His face changed.  Very slowly, it went from bemused five year old,  just taking traveling as it comes at him, to a real little person who was looking back at somebody he loved – at somebody who looked so, so sad, what with those big watery mirrors instead of eyes.  And I could see it—him feeling that something needed to be done about the sadness, but not knowing what to do.

So I had to suck it all in and make a silly face and a silly wave, and Gin caught his hand reassuringly, prompting just as silly a face and a wave back.  So that was okay.  Okay because in that moment, I finally realized that he knows who I am, and that I matter to him.  And because I could send him away feeling loved.

Now I am home.  I have a lot of toys to put away.  But I think I’m not going to put on my own real life quite yet.  I think I’m going to read a book.  And eat strawberries and nectarines.  And maybe try to knit a horse.  The money?  The house?  The new ink spot remover I paid a fortune for that still hasn’t been tried out?

I’ll think about that tomorrow.