Airports

This past week I was in Peoria for a couple of days for meetings. There is a woman in our group who travels all the time and I was very jealous of her flight times, since she was leaving at 11am on Thursday and returning at 1pm on Friday. I was stuck having to get to the airport at 4:30 in the morning and not getting home until 11 at night on Friday. It turns out I beat her to the meeting because she wound up six hours late when the airline discovered a crack in a cargo hold.

When it was time to come home on Friday, she suggested I try going stand by. I was a little skeptical, since the last time I did that was back in the 70’s when I was in college. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I gave it a try. In Peoria, it was a snap. I just walked right onto the plane instead of sitting there for six hours. In Chicago O’Hare, it was a different story. I did have to wait for two hours, but that was better than the six I was supposed to have to wait. I said a little prayer that I could make the earlier flight and sure enough, I was the only standby person they took.

During my short wait, I did get a lot of work done, transcribing minutes from the meetings I had attended, with my iPod plugged into my head. I use it to drown out cell phone conversations around me, fascinating as the eavesdropping might be. With over a hundred albums to choose from, I can usually find something to listen to that’s more entertaining than some blowhard’s business deals, or a teenager’s mumbled sweet nothings to her boyfriend.

O’Hare is crazy busy. I went to the gate and tried to tell them about my wish to go standby in two hours and the gate guy told me to wait, it was too early. Then I noticed that the arrival/departure screens only cover about an hour of activity. That’s all the space there is. They can’t handle any more. Outside, planes crisscross all the runways like SUV’s at suburban intersections. A few hundred feet above those runways, the planes ascend and land in a wonderfully choreographed dance. One after another, layered like lasagna—they come in they go out.

Leaving O’Hare, I always have the sensation that they are just going to drive the plane out to the interstate and travel overland—it takes that long to taxi to the runway. I had time to make a quick call home to say I’d be in early, and son Shane picked me up in Cleveland.

I came home to a nice spring day. The tulips are up—at least the old ones. The new ones are starting to come in, but they are much shorter than the colorful brochure promised. I bought a few more pansies for the backyard. Many of the originals from last summer survived the winter and look great. Everything just seems so much better on a warm sunny day.