Life- sometimes you just need a bucket of caffeine to get through the day
Nothing looks quite the same when you're wide awake at 3 a.m. and in an airport by 8
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
John Lennon
It’s 8 a.m. on a densely foggy Sunday morning, and I’m wandering around Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) like a homeless waif with a backpack and a laptop. I have five hours to while away before my plane takes off, so I’ve been wandering around people-watching, one of my favorite airport activities.
Airports have always fascinated me. They’re filled with people on the way to somewhere else, their paths crossing mine for only a short period. Where are these other folks going? Who knows? Their destination is less important than the sheer volume of folks heading off to different points of the globe, from Thief River Falls to Tokyo and Milwaukee to Moscow.
Airports are filled with all sorts of people:
Fat people.
Skinny people.
Old people.
Young people.
White people.
Black people.
Brown people.
Green people (yeah, there’s always the woman who had WAY too much tequila the night before and looks like death warmed over).
People on crutches.
People on golf carts.
People drinking coffee.
People who look harried as they babble in an indeterminate language.
People who stride purposefully toward their gate as if they’ve done this many times and could do it in their sleep (I’m almost there).
People in baseball caps.
People in pork-pie hats.
The variety and variations are endless. I went through security, grabbed a latte at Caribou Coffee, pulled up a chair, and commenced watching people as they strolled, rode, and ran past. I could afford to indulge in leisurely observation with five hours to kill. Where else was I going to go? Besides, no one would be the wiser for it.
As I watched people go back and forth, I’d invent stories about them to keep my ADD brain from wandering. This person is going to Boston to perform life-saving surgery…on a ferret. That person is going to London to deliver their Ph.D. dissertation on the indigenous and virtually extinct Bangladeshi transgender rainbow blowfish. And yet another person was headed to Miami, where they’d lie on a beach, get blind drunk- and stay that way- for two solid weeks.
I do NOT want that hangover….
Part of the reason I’m writing this is to help stay awake. I need to create a bit of excitement for myself. Airports are, by their nature, deliberately UNexciting locales.
Erin flew back to Portland ahead of me last week and then on to a business conference in Las Vegas, so she won’t even be home when I get back to Portland. To save what turns out to be a fair bit of money on airfare, I’m flying Minneapolis-Charlotte (CLT)-Portland (PDX).
Yes, you read that correctly. To reach home on the West Coast, I must first fly to the East Coast, where I’ll spend all of 44 minutes on the ground at CLT before flying on to PDX. Gawd, I love American Airlines. That convoluted trip was the best available price, and I was dumb enough to tell Erin I’d do it.
Yeah, I volunteered for this. Who’s the dumbass now?
When I travel solo, I rarely sleep well (or at all) the night before. Last night was no different. I finally gave up and rolled out of bed at 3 a.m. CT (1 a.m. PT). By the time my plane lands at PDX around 11 p.m.…it will have been a day.
Given the reason I was here in the Great White North, it’s good to be going home. The past month has been very heavy, what with losing my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. I feel like I’m dragging an anchor, and I need to be in familiar surroundings again to begin taking care of myself.
For the past 12 days, I’ve focused almost exclusively on my mother and youngest brother. Mom’s in a good place. My brother will take a bit longer, but he’ll get there. I keep telling him the advice that President Biden offers- that you’ll know when you’re getting through your grief when a memory of your loved one brings a smile to your face before tears come to your eyes.
Now, I need to allow myself to work through my own grief, and there’s been a lot of it over the past month. I don’t know what that might look like or when it will come, but I want to be home and surrounded by familiarity when it happens. I can feel it just below the surface, and I’ve found myself crying at odd moments…fortunately by myself because Lord knows the rest of my family needs strength.
Still, I don’t know how much longer I can play the strong, silent one. I think I need to be in a place where I can curl up into a ball and have a good cry, and that means being home, even if I’m there alone.
At the moment, though, I’m still trying to wrap my head around going to Portland via Charlotte. Who says airline pricing structures aren’t random number generators, eh? This will likely be the least direct trip I’ve ever flown…though it will do GREAT things for my frequent flier miles.
As I’m winding this down, though, it’s only 10:45 a.m., and I can already feel the massive amounts of caffeine I’ve consumed since 3 a.m. beginning to wear off. All I really want to do is put my head down on the work table here at Gate E12 and nod off, but I’m terrified that if I do that, I might sleep through boarding and departure.
Maybe if I wandered off in search of a Bloody Mary or a Margarita?
Yeah…that would make EVERYTHING better, right? If the Bloody Mary has bacon in it, I can count it as a second breakfast….
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Back in the day (mid-to-late '80's) I worked a job that required a $H!TT0NNE of travel. One year I turned in 45,000 air miles for a free roundtrip to Tahiti (that was nice.) But airplanes and airports ... I've gotten into the habit of shutting down my awareness of the world around me, because I was feeling the sadness, the desperation, the exhaustion, of the other people too intensely.
You've earned your rest when you get home.