Airports

I could cry a river here at the airport in Denver. Not because I am sad, though I might be. Airports always make me weepy, even now when the speaker is blaring about level orange. The security level interrupts my melancholy, but not too much. I still feel guiltily safe. I am waiting a couple hours for my connecting flight home, neither in Steamboat with my friend since kindergarten or in my tiny house with my three big teenagers. Limbo.

I can’t sit at the gate from which my plane will depart. It’s too early and there is another plane leaving first, a plane to Dulles. I think I’d like to hop on that plane, too. To my sister who recently lost her husband and wants me there, wants all her five little sisters near. Wouldn’t she be surprised if I hopped on that plane instead? What other planes sound good? San Diego? I’ve never been there and with time the way it seems to be accelerating, might never get the chance to go.

The woman next to me on my flight from Steamboat was visiting her youngest daughter who lives in Colorado. Her other two are in Flagstaff and Juneau. She says it is good that the grandbabies are the closest. She lives in Arizona and they are the Flagstaff bunch. I thought about my sister then too, how her only daughter lives in Berlin. Berlin seems so far. Berlin is farther than Juneau, isn’t it? I had asked my seatmate if she came to Steamboat for the Literary Sojourn, like I had. She hadn’t, but knew of the event. She knew of the previous authors and their works. We talked of fiction the last few minutes, waiting for the plane to empty.

The fictitious characters in the authors’ works had minds of their own. All of the authors said so. This made me think I might not be so good at fiction. One author spoke of a character who died and how she didn’t want her to go. But she died anyway. I’d want to keep them alive at all costs. I’d be controlling. I’d feel for the mothers on the pages. I’d not let their children move to Berlin or Juneau. Or, I’d have everyone flying together, big happy families filling whole airplanes. And there wouldn’t be enough tension, too few goodbyes. It wouldn’t be real. It would make for boring fiction, my longing for the constant happy endings.

When I was a little girl, there was no level orange, that we knew of. There were no security gates. We drove to the airports as teenagers and ran around, watching tearful goodbyes and jubilant hellos. There may or may not have been alcohol involved. At my girlhood airport, you could press your face against the glass and strain to see your loved ones in the tiny windows. Squinting and scanning the plane, you wouldn’t be able to find their seat, even if they told you where they were. But you knew they could see you in that big glass. You knew if you jumped and waved your arms furiously, they would see you. They would know you were going to miss them. They would know you would stand riveted to that spot of massive glass until your plane was a speck in the sky.

Now there are only strangers thrown together in all of the airports, the goodbyes and hellos said perfunctorily in baggage claim or carside in the passenger drop off lane. My friend said goodbye to me in the United check-in line. I’m not sure when I will see her next, how tall her little ones will be if an entire year passes. I’m angry at time, really pissed off.

I don’t know how I got to be forty-four, worrying about my own children setting off to Juneau or Berlin. I’m not an author of fiction and they are real. Nothing will stop them from their own journeys. Next year, the two of them who are ostensibly adults could be anywhere but my tiny house. I chuckle at how I might miss the day when I was filled with anxiety about the poker tournaments and broken ceiling fan of their parentless partying.

In Denver, I sit in limbo. I didn’t get on the flight to Dulles and my sister won’t know about my brief Northern Virginia mind travel. My friend calls to make sure I made it to Denver. Quick cell phones check-ins are our alternative to the lingering goodbyes of long ago airports. Still, in my mind, I am pressing my face to the glass and waving my arms like crazy so they can all see me and know how much I miss them, how much I will miss them, my friend in Steamboat, my sister in Virginia, and my teenagers who are too soon to fly away somewhere very far from me.

Allergies

The seats on the large plane from Columbus to Denver were smaller than the seats on the little plane from Denver to Hayden. And, the seatbelts on the large plane with the small seats were much larger than the seatbelts on the small plane with the larger seats. Are you still reading? On the little plane from Denver to Hayden, Colorado, I was too fat for the seatbelt. The woman next to me noticed how fat I was and was visibly disgusted. This was before I asked for the seatbelt extender.

The flight attendants are taught to very discreetly hand you the extenders, should you ask for them. The seat extenders are rolled up compactly and handed to you silently, palm facing the floor, the way you would hand your needy girlfriend a tampon at the office. Despite the quiet, nearly imperceptible way the flight attendant handed me the extender, the woman who hated my girth was so horrified that she moved her seat.

It was as if she suspected I was “that big”, but the extender confirmed it for her. I was taking up too much space. How dare I? My outer thighs were slightly touching her outer thighs, and it offended her. So she asked a very tall man a few rows back if she could sit next to him. But first, she took several puffs off of her inhaler. Her skin looked wrinkly and pale, like she may have been a smoker. A smoker with asthma?

I heard the voice of my friend, a nurse practitioner, who recently said, “Don’t you know? Fat is the new smoking.” So, my outer thighs and their proximity to this wrinkly, gasping fretting woman is akin to second hand smoke which could give me lung cancer?

I am dying to tell this encounter to my sister. When we were 22 and 18, we lived in downtown Philadelphia in a loft apartment. My sister, a former model, is five feet ten inches tall and has long blond hair. She is stunning at any weight. But, she never thinks she is. She is certain people are thinking she is taking up too much space, her thighs crossing the invisible line into others’ arbitrary and unpredictable personal space constraints.

In Philadelphia, my sister and I went to the Wells Fargo office to pick up wired money from our father. Likely, it was an emergency such as we needed dinner at the Greek restaurant. We walked there and stood in a long line with unsavory characters, one of whom was vocally opposed to fat people. I have been overweight most of my life so I am certain the woman in the Wells Fargo office was talking about me, though my not-obese sister thought it was both of us. I believe the woman was schizophrenic.

She said, “Obesity. Obesity. I’m allergic to obesity. That and leprosy.” For some reason, my sister and I turned this into a song on the way back to our apartment. To the tune of Todd Rundgren’s Ooooohh Baby Baby. “I did you wrong. My heart went out to play. But in the game I lost you. What a price to pay….. I’m cryin’…Ooooooh oohhh. Baby baby.” Baby Baby became “beach ball, beach ball.” The woman may have said that, too. My sister would remember.

So, twenty-two years later, I found a non-schizophrenic woman who was also similarly allergic to obesity. It was hard not to sing as I walked off the plane, especially since I had a lovely flight with so much room to stretch out in after she removed her wheezing self from my personal space.