Leftovering

by Nance

 So fast that my head is still spinning, I discover that we've switched longitudes and are back on the Left Coast for a couple of months. The world usually looks different from here, and I'm sure I'll find that to be the case this time...as soon as my ears stop that zoned out, plane trip hum and my brain catches up with the rest of my space suit. I'll be trying to open the refrigerator door with the wrong hand and pawing the walls fruitlessly for light switches for a week.

Whatever this post contains, I plead Jet Lag Compounded by Old Age. Which reminds me of the obituary my friend, Susan, sent me recently from a small town newspaper: the beloved deceased was known for her collections of Precious Moments and Mickey Mouse figurines and she died of "complications of old age."   I not only want that in my obituary, but I intend to make liberal use of that diagnosis as an excuse to ramble aimlessly on one of my favorite Twenty-First Century subjects.

Airport Econ and Culture Studies

We spend a ridiculous amount of time in Charlotte-Douglas International, the southern hub we prefer to the more crowded Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta.  Charlotte is still crowded, but you see fewer people running on the moving sidewalk and you can actually walk from one end of the airport to the other in fifteen minutes.

 We also love the USO in Charlotte.  It's big and comfortable and it lets us visit with active duty service members headed for or returning from the Middle East.  There, they can kick back in big recliners, pick up a used book or two, plug into wi-fi, catch the news or sports on a big screen TV, and grab a hot dog.  The volunteer staffers are cheerful retirees who embody a sense of home. I can't understand why, when the news is on at the USO, it's always FOX; do those kindly volunteers assume that, once some mother's child dons the uniform, they automatically become conservatives?  Seems to me, if the POTUS we elected was a Democrat....well, it's just one more of the fascinating puzzles in the field of Airport Anthropology.

Despite the fact that the room is peopled largely by 18 to 25 year-olds and the television is on, it's noticeably, disarmingly quiet there. I always imagine that USO as a way-station for uniformed time travelers in shocked transition between utterly dissimilar universes. We like to say hello softly and  make a donation, because, naturally, we support our troops even when we don't agree with the wars being waged.  You can click on the logo if you'd like to do the same.

In the spring of 2008, we discovered a little-known economic indicator at the airport: the shoe-shine kiosk was empty.  We'd never seen that before, never really paid it much attention; it had always been busy and we'd taken it for granted, but on this trip we were shocked to find that both shiners and shinees had disappeared.  Business travel was in the tank.  That struck us more forcibly at the time than a headline in the Wall Street Journal. Then, in the fall of '09, we noticed that a couple of workers and customers had returned. Yesterday, all five stadium seats were full of garrulous men in crisp, pale blue oxford cloth shirts, red or maroon ties, and creased suit pants, happily exchanging business cards while the workers slapped the toes of ten black wingtips into mirror shine...living testimonials to economic recovery for now.

The people-watching in airports is justifiably famous.  There's always a couple of strange souls at each gate who trigger stories in my head about a Parallel Universe America (apparently, jet lag causes me to channel Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Kurt Vonnegut ).  There were the, now accustomed, piercing competitors who vie for the category of Strangest Self-Mutilation and who look like they fell down the basement stairs with a tackle box.  And the tattoo artists who wear their art from neck to wrist to ankle; they have to wear clothes over their art and it must be hard for them to get their t-shirt logos to compliment their body-art themes, as busy as they've been lately.  It's jarring to see a delicately tinted Pegasus emerging from the short sleeve of a Brotha Lynch Hung t-shirt.

Yesterday's Anomalous Airport Entity was a woman about my age sporting an unusually large nose with heavy black pince nez, bright red-red hair with white roots and a polyester dress printed all over with Chairman Mao images.  She stood up for most of the flight and knitted something bright blue. I was dazzled by her. In the struggle we elders experience between hiding our complications of aging or flaunting them, she opted for the latter.