I hugged my son and smiled at my ex-wife. I get extra time with my son on Tuesdays and Thursdays this summer after his morning day camp, as my ex works in her local supermarket in the floral department a few days a week. She had met our son and I at a pizza place after her shift was over, as he had requested pizza and it was way too hot to cook. I had to take a redeye to Atlanta that night, which meant I had to leave straight away to go to the airport, so our switchover was a bit hasty, also switching over the leftovers from the pizza feast.
I drove to the airport, parked my car, and headed inside, through security and the dozens of minor indecencies and invasions that that now entails. I had an hour to kill, and since I was going to have a long night, I told myself that, even though I was on a mission to cut way down on my drinking, I could have a martini while I watched the last few innings of the Mariners game. Plus I love airport bars. Great people watching. Long pours. No volume on the television. Generally professional drinkers only.
I sat down next to a woman working on her laptop, typing out a training document diligently with headphones on. The guy next to me was nursing a beer and watching the baseball game. My first sip of my drink nearly killed me – went down the wrong pipe, sending me into a coughing fit, so much for professional drinking – and the woman next to me took her earphones off. She smiled and gave me her glass of water and asked if there was anything she could do. No, I croaked, unless you can give me my voice back – the water was lifesaving, though. She smiled again and said “don’t worry about it” and then put her earphones back in and went back to typing.
I drank more water and watched the ballgame. The guy next to me was leaning back slightly in his high backed barstool, arms crossed, legs crooked under the seat and notched into the cross slats. Before I realized what I was doing, I assumed the same posture, and immediately felt awkward. Why had I copied this guy’s exact pose? Was I just a lame physical copycat, unable to find some different position that was uniquely my own? So I uncrossed my arms, uncrooked my legs, leaded forward onto my elbows and tried to watch the game that way. No dice – by leaning forward, I was now staring up into a small forest of beer taps. Leaning back, I realized I could see over them. But leaning back required crossing my arms and crooking my legs for balance. So I reassumed my original position, now satisfied that the guy had just discovered on his own, before I was aware of it, the perfect sitting posture for those seats, and while I may be copying him, I was at least copying perfection.
I started thinking about how we mimic one another, especially thinking of my son, who’s picked up on all sorts of mannerisms, especially verbal ones. We’re not merely mimics, though – my son has morphed lots of the little phrases he hears and made them indelibly his own (“that’s very silly”, said with a lilt and a bubble; “no No no no nono”; more recently, “you’re the best dad ever”). I then realized I was really overthinking this. So I breathed a bit, allowed myself to feel normal even given the fact that I was sitting exactly the same way as a total stranger next to me, cleared my mind, and watched some television.
The Mariners reliever got a guy to fly out to center field, and I clapped once and pumped my fist. The guy next to me took that as a signal to talk to me – which it wasn’t explicitly, but I guess unconsciously I wanted it to be – and made a forgettable comment about how the reliever was doing, and how the previous reliever hadn’t done nearly as well, which I remember now for no good reason. We talked for another inning – a long slow inning of late inning relief pitching anxiety – and I then had to leave to board my flight. He introduced himself as I left, I did the same, and we both wished one another “good flight”. Odd that the introductions happened at the end of a conversation, and somehow that summed up life for me in that moment – introductions when they were no longer valid, connections after they had meaning.
I got to the gate just as the gate agent was boarding my rows. A woman stood quietly to the side of the gate, and I gestured for her to go ahead of me, but she didn’t move. The gate agent said “I think she needs help. You’re clearly a frequent flier – could you help bring her to the plane?” I said sure.
I smiled at the woman, she smiled back, and the gate agent said, very slowly and distinctly, with the piercing sharp clear cadence of Pacific Northwest Scandinavian descendants, “this gentleman will help you.” The woman, a slight Chinese woman probably in her 60s or 70s, just smiled more broadly, pointed to her boarding card, and spoke some Chinese. I used some of the very little Chinese I know, taught by my ex-in-laws, and said “Lai lai lai!” with a big smile and a wave towards the gate – it means “come come come” and my ex-father-in-law would use that to get the attention of my dog or my son – and she realized I was friendly and at least somewhat sympathetic to her linguistic plight, and she started to follow me down the ramp.
It was a long slow amble towards the outdoor gate – turboprops don’t get jet bridges and why would they? they aren’t jets! – and as I weaved around her to make sure she stayed to the right, I noticed how she was just smiling and enjoying herself. I was enjoying myself too: the late evening summer sun was shining orange in a sky filled with forest fire smoke, the faint smell of burnt pine and aviation fuel in the air, the evening temperature perfect, the martini in me signaling that I’d probably get a nap on the short flight to Portland before the four hour redeye to Atlanta.
All was not right with my world – I was feeling the tug of limbo hard, feeling the tug of my recent history even harder, feeling the suction of the future drawing me into it – but I wasn’t worrying about that, I was just in the now. The now was about a far too long winding ramp towards a door, and the moment was good. I’m getting better at finding happiness in the moments, and not getting too far ahead of myself to queer the joy.
But only temporarily – the door leading out to the tarmac meant trouble. The flights from Seattle to Portland are on turboprops, glorious overhead wing Bombardier Q400 twin engine aircraft. However, Q400s also have no overhead bin space to speak of, which I realized would soon be a problem as the Chinese woman was dragging behind her a bag that would clearly need to be gate checked. Beyond the door loomed the gate check bag cart and two goofy looking baggage loading guys. We were going to have to get the Chinese woman to give up her bag.
I stopped us in front of the bag cart and gestured towards her bag and pointed towards the back of the plane, where other bag loaders were throwing the checked baggage into the hold. That proved to be a good idea, because the woman let go of her too-big roller bag and followed my hand and started talking, which gave the first goofy bag loader by the cart a chance to take action. It was a keen demonstration of skill on his part – he moved to add the tag less than a moment after the Chinese woman had let go of the handle, and before she could react to the sound, he had clicked down the handle and thrown the bag onto the cart.
The woman looked first at me, then at the bag loader, who was now grinning sheepishly, and she started talking to me in Mandarin. I understood none of the words but the meaning was obvious: “Why are they taking my bag? I need to bring it on the plane. Please get the bag back for me so I can bring it with me.” I gestured towards the bag, widened my arms saying “too big for plane”, pointing then at the plane, but it made no difference. I looked to the goofy bag loaders for help, but they were barely holding it together, knowing this story would probably get them some good “dumb passenger story” street cred later. The Chinese woman kept talking to me, I kept gesturing.
I had a quick brainstorm, and grabbed my phone from my pocket. I typed quickly while trying to smile back every few keystrokes:
I showed her the screen, pointing to the Chinese characters, and she smiled broadly, said “Xie xie! Thank you!,” patted me on the shoulder, and relaxed. I smiled back, saying one of my few other Mandarin phrases “Dui bu qi” (don’t worry about it – more or less), and patted her on the back and directed her towards the plane.
She sat down a few rows in front of my seat, and I took mine. I immediately wanted to take a screenshot of my phone – I was pretty sure this was going to be worth retelling – but had no idea how to do it. An Indian guy sat down next to me, reeking of body odor – I felt bad for the guy, as it was a really hot day, but at the same time he was in jeans and long sleeve t-shirt, and it occurred to me that the least he could have done, if not shower, was to wear cooler clothes so that he wouldn’t sweat so much. But as he looked tech savvy, with his giant smartphone and fancy noise-cancelling earphones, I figured he could tell me how to take a screen shot of my phone. He couldn’t, but as we were bemoaning our mutual tech lack of savvy, the mom in the row behind us spoke up and said “my teenage daughter probably knows how to do that” and we both looked at her daughter. She had even fancier earphones, and was clearly in her own sonic world, so we had to gesture a bit to get her attention. She was maybe 15, actually a pretty cool looking 15 with a light purple streak in her hair and a nifty black and white striped top, far cooler than anything I could have imagined being associated with when I was a teenager but realizing that that was, in fact, what I would have liked to have been associated with back when I was a teenager.
“Press the home button and then the close button almost immediately afterwards,” she said after taking off her headphones, her face softening from the hard teenage expression she had worn a moment before. I did as I was told and it worked. I thanked her and, unexpectedly, she smiled and said “don’t worry about it”. Then she put her headphones back on – still smiling – and looked benignly at the Indian guy and me.
I travel a lot. I try my best to be a good traveler, a Zen traveler as I think of it – unruffled by delays, calm in the face of gate changes and cancellations, coolly rebooking when traffic makes me miss a flight.
I hope the next time I find someone choking at an airport bar, I put down what I’m doing and offer them water and help and a smile when it’s all better.
I hope the next time I travel to a foreign place with no knowledge of the language, I trust someone blindly to lead me somewhere and then allow them to take my bag away from me.
I hope the next time I’m asked a trivial question that should be obvious, I’ll smile even more broadly and offer up the answer with unselfish joy.
I don’t want to be just a Zen traveler anymore. I want to demonstrate to others what it means to be good, to trust, to love when I travel. And maybe then I’ll even be able to do it when I’m not traveling, too.
The door of the Q400 remained open as the flight attendant announced over the intercom that we were all ready to depart, except we didn’t yet have a pilot on board. The people onboard laughed – probably even the Chinese woman, even though she may have only laughed because everyone else did, but who cares, it was a happy plane. It’s hard not to be happy on a Q400, with its lovely overhead wings and sleek turboprop engines and landing gear with hydraulics out for all to see beside the fuselage.
Turboprops are like the streamlined steam trains of the 1930s. Turboprops were the last gasp of propeller technology, bridging between piston engines and the turbofan jet age to follow. Steam trains and propeller planes both remind you that the movement they create is a kind of magical life unto itself: the hiss and squeal of a locomotive matched by the how close you are to the mechanics on a propeller plane, how obvious it is that the engines are drawing air over the wings and how things like landing gear and pitot tubes are really unnaturally shaped. Piston planes are quaintly lovely and cantankerous, much like old 19th century steam, but turboprops bring grace to the table. They aren’t exactly like the streamliners, which brought a kind of class to the rails, evoking cocktails and men in well cut suits – no, for turboprops, it’s dance, a masculine dance of movement and grace. But they don’t dance lightly – there is nothing feminine in those purring whirring spinning growling concoctions – they dance with assertiveness. They also sing.
Eventually the pilot showed up and the door closed. The sun was turning a deep red in the smoky haze, and the turboprops spun to life with the whine of their electric starters. I heard a kind of melody in the plane start to emerge from the engines as the turbines fired up, from the hum and tickle of the fuselage as it rocked back and forth as the engines warmed while the plane remained still. Maybe not a melody – not much going on in terms of rhythm or lilt there – but more of a harmonic, reminding me of Philip Glass or the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. First an A major seventh chord, with harmonics down into deep bass, modulating to D minor as the pilot throttled up a bit to taxi to the end of the runway. All intermingling as the throttle moves to full, and we lurched and accelerated down the runway, the staticky roar of the rubber wheels and bouncing suspension beneath the engines rasping behind the harmonies. Then a simple C major fifth with diminished seventh above into liftoff, a pure sound emerging as the tires broke free of the earth and were swallowed into the engine pods. Finally the diminished seventh faded away, leaving a simple B flat minor fifth dropping into an A minor fifth as we climbed above the smoke, into the golden glow of the sun away over the horizon in the Pacific.