Airports

I am saying goodbye to my daughter at the airport. Sasha is ten and about to fly alone to Florida to visit her best friend. We lean into each other, forehead to forehead, Sasha looking fearless and anticipative, I misty-eyed and filled with awareness that this is but one of many separations to come.

On the return trip, Sasha’s plane makes an unscheduled stop. She calls to let me know that she has followed some other passengers to a new boarding area and will take a different plane home. I am shaken and irate at the airline; my daughter is matter-of-fact.

A decade later Sasha calls me from the airport in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she is changing planes on a return flight from Greece. She is badly sunburned and has been waiting for hours. There is no information desk in sight, and Sasha has forgotten most of her high-school German. I place a frantic call to her former pediatrician, who advises wet paper towels and plenty of fluids. I spend the night mothering Sasha long-distance, running up an exorbitant phone bill.

Another decade has passed, and my daughter is a scientist doing environmental field research in Costa Rica and Bolivia. She travels in and out of back-country airstrips, in aircraft the size of large dragonflies. I worry about plane crashes, poisonous snakes, killer bees, and political unrest. By phone Sasha reassures me in her clear, calm voice. “Vaya con Dios,” I say as we hang up, thinking a Spanish blessing couldn’t hurt.

I will never be able to keep her safe — never have been able to, really, even when she was an infant in my arms. My daughter’s life — all life — is as fragile as a plane in flight, as a dragonfly’s wings. I live in anticipation of our next airport reunion, when we’ll lean into each other, forehead to forehead, all distance erased, my daughter returned to me once more.

Sheila Reed
Elmira, New York

My parents weren’t the kind who picked their children up at the airport. “Just take a cab,” my mother would sigh over the phone whenever I planned a trip back to New York City from San Francisco. I’d usually find myself waiting in line at the taxi stand outside JFK International Airport. Or sometimes Khan, the Pakistani car-service driver who whisks my elegant, designer-clad mother around Manhattan, would meet me at the baggage claim.

Single and forty-one, I had managed not to meet any of my mother’s expectations. I hadn’t become a lawyer; I hadn’t even married a lawyer. So I had no idea what to expect from her when I announced that I’d decided to adopt a baby girl from China.

Happily, my mother liked the idea of a Chinese granddaughter. She began to send me newspaper clippings about adopted Chinese girls growing up Jewish on the Upper West Side. Still, she seemed tentative, almost distant, while I waited for an adoption referral. Maybe she wasn’t all that pleased. Or maybe she was just being superstitious. She’d once told me it was tempting fate to hold a baby shower before the baby arrived.

Eight months later the adoption agency sent me a tiny photo of a baby with a spiky fringe of black hair. In a burst of excitement, my parents made reservations to fly to San Francisco so they could be there when I came home from China with my new daughter, Clara. They even agreed to rent a car and pick us up at the airport. My mother and I had several long discussions about how Clara would react to a car seat. “There’s no way she’ll sit in one,” my mother said with certainty. “She’s never seen a car seat in her life.”

"Well, she’ll just have to. And if she doesn’t, I’ll hold her in my lap,” I replied. I was about to fly thousands of miles to a foreign country and be handed a one-year-old. A car seat was the least of my worries.

Clara was given to me, red-faced and screaming, in a government office in Wuhan, China. For the next two weeks, while the adoption was made official, she would not let me put her down. But when we got off the plane in San Francisco and climbed into my parents’ rented Volvo, Clara let me buckle her right into the car seat. My mother, completely enchanted, turned around in the passenger seat and offered Clara a long, manicured finger to clutch. They stayed that way for the entire forty-five-minute ride home.

Clara is four years old now, a happy preschooler who likes chow-mein noodles and the matzo balls she and my mother make from a mix when she visits my parents. The last time I planned a trip to Manhattan, my mother said Khan would pick us up at the airport. And he was there, at the baggage claim, holding up a sign with our name on it. But so was my mother, hunkered down in a dirty orange plastic chair, smiling as we approached.

Name Withheld

When my dad was at the height of his cocaine addiction, I told my high-school counselor about his rages and beatings. She sympathized and said she could report it, but while he got treatment, I would be put in Chicago’s foster-care system; at my age, sixteen, that meant a group home where I would be housed among juvenile offenders. She told me some horror stories about those homes. I thanked her for the warning and told her I preferred the beatings. Then I ran away.

It was winter in Chicago. I couldn’t afford an apartment or even a transient hotel on my meager income from a part-time job. So I rode the trains and buses to stay warm, and, when I had absolutely no place to sleep, I went to the airport. There was almost always a delayed flight, and where there was a delayed flight, there was a crowd of stranded travelers for me to slip into and find a place to sleep. The roaming security guards made me feel safe. A bathroom was never far away, and, if it was deserted enough, I could risk washing my hair and taking a sponge bath. Some mornings I might talk to a monk in robes and learn about his religion, or hear some Bob Dylan wannabe strumming a beat-up guitar. Those terminals were my only safe haven during that frightening time.

Sometime in the early nineties, I was watching the ten o’clock news, and the anchor reported that, for security reasons, the terminals at O’Hare would be open to ticketed passengers only from then on. A sadness came over me, and I wept for anyone who might be looking for a safe place to sleep on a cold winter night.

Name Withheld

It was 1969, and the Vietnam War was in full swing. At my father’s urging, my eighteen-year-old brother enlisted in the navy to avoid the risk of getting drafted into the army and ending up dodging bullets in the jungle. I don’t remember much about the day my brother left for Great Lakes Naval Training Center except that I got his room. I was eleven.

Six weeks later my brother was coming home on his first leave. My parents, my sister, and I waited at the airport gate, surrounded by hugging strangers. As the crowd thinned out, I began to think my brother was not going to walk down the narrow jetway. What if he didn’t come home? I had never before considered the possibility that something might happen to him. The thought disturbed me, because I did love my brother, who expressed his affection for me, his kid sister, mostly with punches to the arm and thumps to the back of the head.

Then I looked up at a tall sailor with a shaved head, dressed all in white, wearing shiny shoes and carrying an enormous sea bag on his shoulder. My brother shook my dad’s hand and hugged my mom and tousled my hair. Where was the punch? Where was the thump? Who was this polite, grown-up stranger?

My brother eventually went to Vietnam, where he served on a ship, relatively out of harm’s way. After he’d finished his tour of duty, he was stationed in Long Beach, California. He’d send me albums by the Beatles and Jackson Browne and James Taylor, records my friends and I hadn’t heard yet. California seemed the source of all cool music.

A couple of years later he got discharged from the navy and came home to Virginia. Once again we headed to the airport. I was now fifteen and, in my mind, almost grown-up. Waiting at the gate, I tried to look nonchalant in my frayed bell-bottoms, straight hair, and John Lennon glasses: as if I came to the airport all the time; as if I knew my way around the airport.

I watched the narrow jetway, eyes peeled for the tall sailor. But as the last passengers emerged, there was no sailor. There was only a tall, shaggy-haired hippie carrying a huge sea bag. He was smiling at us. Once again my brother was a stranger to me.

Debbie Remington
St. Petersburg, Florida

My mother, my father, and I are late departing for the airport, and I am annoyed. My father is holding us up with his primping, slicking his hair down with some acrid-smelling gel. At this rate, I may miss my plane.

“For God’s sake, we’re only going to the airport,” I say.

“I need to look good for my little girl,” he says, “in case I don’t see you again.”

This comment catches me off guard. It’s the first hint he’s given that he is aware of his failing health; normally he insists that my mother is exaggerating. She has whispered to me over the phone, her voice tinged with fear, that she’s found my father walking through the neighborhood in his pajamas or standing in the corner of the living room, staring at his feet.

My father speeds us to the airport, focused and tense, and we arrive so late that he has to drop me off at the curb. My mother will walk me to the gate while he parks the car and tries to catch up with us. I hustle to my gate but put off boarding the plane while I look around for my father. I’d hate to leave without saying goodbye to him. I live two thousand miles away, and it may be a full year before I see him again.

When they call for final boarding, my father still has not shown up. Reluctantly I get on, find my seat, and shove my baggage into the overhead bin. The cabin door is about to close when the flight attendant announces my name over the intercom and motions for me to come to the front.

My victorious father is there, having pushed his way through and demanded to see me. Every ounce of anger I have been feeling vanishes. We hug and accidentally kiss on the lips. I go back to my seat, buckle up, and promptly burst into tears, gripped by a powerful fear that I will never see him again.

I never do.

Tama J. Kieves
Denver, Colorado

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