Home again and the airport

Hi.

I’m back from a couple of weeks away. I already posted pics of DC. Shortly thereafter I headed to Chicago for five days to escort another group around town.

I love Chicago. Most of you know that I go once every December. I have had a couple of other chances to go over the years, almost always on someone else’s dime (which I really like). I took an opportunity or two while I was there this time to venture out on my own without looking too intently at a map. I really enjoyed that, and have started to take a great deal of pleasure in going somewhere other than home and acting like I live there. I even wound up helping a nice couple from Detroit find their way to their destination on the L one day. “Just going” makes the world a little bit bigger and a little more amazing every time I do it. I hope to find more chances to do that soon.

Otherwise, life is pretty busy right now. I like being busy, at least the kind of busy that I am these days. My workload is very heavy, and that is a welcome thing. I have started enjoying the simplicity of reading and working out again more than I have in some time. Other parts of my life are better than they have been in some time as well, but none of it seems appropriate to blog about at this point. Nevertheless, life is good.

An overly romantic monologue about the airport

One of the few things that my brother and I enjoyed doing together when we were small was looking at airplanes. We would frequently get my grandparents’ 1962 set of encyclopedias and turn to “Airplane” and just look at the pictures, amazed each time by the same old photos as though it was the first time we had seen them. Our favorite activity was sitting by the side of the runway at the Nashville airport (when you could still do that) and watching the planes land and depart. We were both thrilled when a group trip to the airport once allowed us to sit in the cockpit of an airline jet. We were always intrigued by the pictures or the real thing, and that interest obviously became a profession for him.

At some point, I developed a sort of intellectual/emotional crush on airports. When the then-new Nashville airport terminal was opened in 1988 or so, I would often get my mom to take me to the ticketing area and drop me off for a while. I found a strange joy in wandering around, looking at the different kinds of people that the airport welcomed, considering the number and variety of people that was required to get passengers on an airplane and an airplane off the ground, and just soaking it up.

Today, in spite of the complications that are present in air travel, I still enjoy that. I think airports are amazing meeting points of the most diverse types of people, intents, and destinations. It’s one of the few places that must accommodate the most privileged and the most disadvantaged, as upscale bars and massage spas catering to wealthy clients are regularly passed by wheelchairs and motorized carts transporting the disabled and elderly. It’s one of those places which notoriously houses beginnings and endings, as soldiers arrive from and depart to their orders, kids meet and then say “goodbye” to their non-custodial parents surrounding a rare week together, and best men and bride’s maids arrive for the events peripheral to the weddings of friends from whom they are separated by far too much distance. It’s where long-distance boyfriends and girlfriends meet their other for a much-anticipated weekend, and then depart after being fulfilled by companionship or devastated by the unfortunate result of loving someone that isn’t physically near them. Ex’s, corpses, citizens, nationals, rock stars, washed-up wrestlers, hopeful late-stage cancer patients, alive and productive movers, future murderers, future saints, the lonely, the loved, the glamorous, the people of “inner beauty,” the excited, and the disappointed meet at their most dynamic at the airport.

(I’m a bit troubled by a minor similarity between that bit of gushing about the airport and the lyrics to “Car Wash.”)

Sorry for the wax. I’m still intrigued by the airport and that combination of negative and positive energy that contributes to its vibrancy. I look forward to more destinations in the future, and to more experiences of the crossroads of all of those people heading in different directions for very different reasons.