Travelling

It was so much easier to just stay on the plane, but she couldn't. She had to move off of the 777 or whatever giant flying cargo vehicle she'd just flown in on, be herded off like everyone. She had to make sure her paperwork was ready before she toed the line on the floor that marked thirty minutes to the official behind the plexi-glass half-shield that protected the biometric equipment from foreign sneezing. Or domestic sneezing, for that matter. The Homeland Security officials didn't discriminate, favoring one type of person's sneezes over another's. That would be rude.

So she took her little customs card, the one that asked you to really and truly declare the vegetables that you had brought in your overhead luggage from the homeland. Or the explosives or flammable materials, or the large amounts of money in any currency. She knew her passport information by heart, and she had nothing remotely flammable in her carry-on, though she had thought of setting her eight pair of panties on fire just to purge their collective funk from the suitcase. She'd taken to washing those in the bathroom sinks during every flight, one or two at a time. She used the soap available in the hand-pump dispenser, and if she was lucky she'd been bumped up to Club class and the soap was lavender-and-verbena scented. That helped with the funk, but didn't really eradicate it. It had been seven weeks since she'd been anywhere like a laundrette...Anyway: not flammable, no produce of any kind, no wads of cash. Dingy panties, passport and traveller's checks, rain parka, dancing shoes, many t-shirts that gained or lost relevance depending on which side of an ocean she'd just landed on, jeans that may or may not be kind to her starch-blitzed middle (it had been five weeks since she'd worn anything other than one of her two pairs of sweatpants.) Light colored hoodie. She'd bought that after she noticed that Security officers took aside and frisked a disproportionate amount of people in dark hoodies, and looked at hoodie-wearing as some sort of international gang sign. The men and women on duty would frown at you with their mouths or brows if you wore a hoodie, but she couldn 't give up the fleecy, embracing comfort yet, so she wore her light-yellow long-sleeved security blanket and had her story ready when she came to any kind of checkpoint.

The story was key to getting done what she needed to do, and she had practiced it in a terminal mirror before every re-telling for the first week of her travels. It had slowed her, and she had missed flights and had had to wait whole hours (once even a day, spent sleeping on benches as if she were just delayed, as if she were a retiree going to Greece or Florida or something,) but it had it's purpose. She knew the story by heart, or by soul, really: it reflected more her soul that her heart, she felt, if the listener were willing to peer deeper into the narrative. They weren't, generally. It was often enough just to tell the story and watch the official person glaze over with irritation, since that meant she had a very good chance of getting through because the official person didn't want to be bothered. She was the buck that was passed, and it had insulted her for a while, stung her un-sought-out soul. She learned not to resent the reason she was passed through the gates or doors or turnstiles or x-ray chambers. There would be a sympathetic ear somewhere in this next jaunt to Heathrow Airport. She was in Atlanta, in the States, and she had to (wanted to) turn right around and get the 8:10 am to Heathrow- it would be a swing, a high-stakes, adrenalized amble through the airport to get to the employee lounge computer to book her standby and then to the gate before last call, but she had the rubber-soled footwear for the job and she's never twisted an ankle in her life. Plus she had the story.

She made it to the front of the line, and was waved on to a booth with a semi-mild, semi-young man in it who looked neutrally at her passport and didn't grill her about leaving her suitcase unattended. She held her breath a bit, and let it out slowly. She had to time when to begin her sonnet- everyone was different, everyone's sense of the beginning of things was so varied that this was the hardest part of her mission, making sure she didn't step on someone's line or crush the silence rather than breaking it gently like an egg. She breathed. She waited for it, waited for it- he looked hard at his screen, he was reading the notes in her profile, and she had to allow him that and yet not allow him to come to a judgement about what he found out- she waited for it- he glanced up. She began:

"I know, it's a lot of stuff in there, right? It looks bad. I think it looks bad, does it look bad? I'm not sure what you guys are looking for, I just get on the planes because- well, it's there, it's in there, right?" She paused,  moving her face into a rigor of openness.

"It looks..." the official began, but stopped. She counted to three.

"I have those conditions, and the medication for both of them is controlled, so I can't just walk into a-" she paused to think about which country and which city she was in, remembering the name of their most virulent drug store- "Rite-Aid and have them call my doctor. Who's in England. So..." she sighed with fatigue, not faked. "So getting it means I have to go back, more than I want to, I just want to stay and finish what I need to do. There's a memorial service, and..." She let it trial off, looked at him with dry and sleepy eyes.

"What are you doing in Georgia? What business brings you here? I see by this you're usually coming to O'Hare. Chicago's in a much different area of the country." He snorted just a little after he said it, conveying his mild disgust for the Midwest.

"I know! There's so much business that I had to do there-" This was true, there was business. There were meeting with lawyers and alienated family members and actual services to attend or attend to in the Midwest. There was grief, of course. There was sobbing that would have to happen when she attended to said business. She touched down in O'Hare International Airport over and over but she never, ever put her mind or her hands to the business. "I end up getting there but I have to go back, I did that about three times, I swear it was-"

The official looked at her instead of the screen, held that look. "It was eight."

She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. The thing that made everything work was the story, and the thing that made the story believable was the telling of it: the details got more elaborate with every disembarking, and they surprised her as much as they informed them, and her reactions stayed true and consistent. She'd gasped because she was really shocked, because she didn't realize it was eight times. "God I have to stop" came out of her mouth before she could school it, but it was behind her hand so she thought he hadn't heard. "Anyway, I now have to go back again! There's an 8:10 flight back to Heathrow, can you believe it? But I have to get my daughter and bring her with me for the thing. The service. God."

"I don't know about- well, you can see how someone might think you're taking something back or bringing something here that we said we didn't want here? Like drugs-" he was making the speech, but she interrupted.

"I wrote it out on my form there! The only drugs I have are the ones I told you about, my prescriptions. I have to have an injection of one of them soon, actually. I'm coming up on my scheduled injection." She had no such medication, though it was true that if she didn't take her scheduled dose of Pregabalin soon she would feel really bad in about an hour. She would ache everywhere and she would have an even harder time napping on the plane to Heathrow if she didn't get that dose; she'd said it was an injection because everyone knew what a diabetic seizure looked like, and so far every official she'd encountered that dilly-dallied with her passage stood aside when she brought up the specter of a hypodermic needle. She wasn't diabetic but she never said she was. It was mutually beneficial for them to jump to the conclusion, but for some reason this semi-mild, semi-old fellow didn't flinch.

"Security worries about more than drugs, thank you. You could be trafficking jihadist literature or something like that. You could have been hired to transport illegal machine parts." He was clearly impovizing.

"You're joking. You must have seen some weird contraband, right? Machine parts!" She chuckled. She was certain she could get him on her side, give him the emotional equivalent of a pint with a mate right there at the kiosk.

"You wouldn't beleive it. There's machine parts that are contraband, on my honour." (He took a moment to look at her face, and did she notice a twinkle in his face? Was there a klatch, was there a camraderie that had just started?) "So, technically- you could have machine parts. Illegal machine parts from Russian tanks or some rot. Old laws."(...there was!)

She put her best sheltered housewife expression forward, and cry-whispered "What on Earth do people need those for??" as earnestly as the semi-hush in the security lines allowed. The man smiled, breaking his face into fully-mild, and did the stamping and the finger-pressing and even offered her some of his hand sanitizer when he was done. She'd introduced herself and learned his name was Colin as he was rolling the tip of her thumb on the clean biometric thumb reader. She told him her name, and she told him a little bit of the story she told them all.

"I have to go to a memorial service for my aunt, my great-aunt- and she was like a mother to me. Cancer got her. It got my uncle too, I hope the God they are up there eating a bunch of my Mom's strawberry-rhubarb cobbler right now, looking down. And I have these conditions-"

Colin, listening, looked at his screen again and asked her to wipe her hands on a new baby wipe, which he supplied. When it was done he said "My uncle too. Cancer." He flicked his eyes away from his readout and up to her for a second.

"Don't you hate it like, like the worst you could hate anything? But I have two medical conditions and they make me hurt- they are basically just nothing but pain." The woman was well into the details that she could never forget and so kept her voice casual. She noticed that using a casual voice during this part was what impressed; she'd learned to appear even-keeled while she yammered to strangers the strange circumstances of her mystery illnesses. For some reason they always believed her, and to her mind the facts that she hurt all the time and couldn't sleep for no good reason and might be losing her eyesight and was definitely losing her teeth were the parts that sounded most like bullshit.  Colin responded with sympathy and hurried her through, getting out from behind his kiosk to walk her to the next desk, even. She thanked him with urgency. She almost cried with relief and full-body gratitude, saying "Bless you" probably a few more times than was prudent, but she was babbling. She'd have to watch that for when she got to Heathrow: too much was a tip-off, even if what was in overabundance was humility. People didn't trust it.

She got to the employee lounge. She got to the gate. She waited, possibly-misfit eyes losing focus so that she had to close them and listen for her name, which she didn't like to do (she wanted all her senses, as we all do.) She was called- she got on the plane, and her seat assignment was in a low number, so that she was in Club class and she had two loungers to herself since there had been no pair of people willing to pay for the un-separated honeymoon seats in the dead center of the Club section. She sent up a prayer, a beg of good Karma for the security sentinel Colin. She tore open the plastic film that covered the softer-than-Economy-Plus quilted blanket she was offered, even though as a friend of an employee she should smilingly refuse it. But she was a grieved woman and she was sure she could explain that to the flight attendant who had looked at her askew at some point during the flight. It was a long trip. It took over eight hours.

Gathering Her Around Me

There is a staggering amount of things here. Her apartment- my apartment, for now, logically if not literally- is full of things that she liked and stuff she used and stuff she didn't use, crammed into the apartment's closets. Mom and Dad spent years driving a motor home all over America and into Mexico. They knew how to keep things simple, only minimally cluttered and in tiny amounts because of the lack of household surfaces. But here: her apartment, the one she bought after she lost Dad, is full, and we'll have the regular amount of purging to do before we can sell it. It keeps surprising me.

I keep thinking about comforting. Everyone wants to help me and my sister: there's pie and unasked-for prayers and offers of company. If I accept one of these, I'm afraid I'm doing it more for the sweet person offering it than for myself- it's a bit painful to think of these sincere well-wishers being left holding a rejected offering. Sometimes I want something and sometimes I don't. Ninety-five percent of the time when I do, I feel comforted.

There's one thing that bothers me: the offer of fantasy. People have said- via the usual social media channels- that she's an angel or in Heaven or that it's ok because she's with Dad, her husband, her best friend for 44 years. That last one...slays me. To think of her with her husband, together and (why not) young and healthy again, looking at each other with laughing fondness as in many of the pictures we have of them together before we were born and they got busy. My sister and I grew up with them looking at each other like that, so we know that was the tenor of their relationship even if there aren't as many like pictures from the family years. It...kills me, to think it, because I don't know for certain that's what is happening.

We tell each other those stories to comfort ourselves, of course, not because we have any real knowledge; yet I keep wanting to ask anyone who provides that particular vision for proof. There must be proof, I want there to be proof! The thought of them together at last and happy as they were and unconcerned because they either understand everything now or because they don't care, they did a good job in life, a good job as parents and they're done...is so lovely and so weighty that it feels dangerous to me. I'll believe it when there is some proof, and I'll give forty gold pieces to anyone who can find it for me.

The need for some real, almost-tangible foundation for that belief is a legacy of Mom's, ha ha ha! She was a rational woman and didn't stand for much of that spirit-talk in her lifetime. She was a Quaker, semi-devout, doing good deeds and joining committees when asked, yet when we talked about God she always said she had no words: it was too big a concept, too unknowable to express. She confessed she had barely an idea that God was there, and she practiced listening every Sunday she could. So this skepticism is bred into me by the very woman who's death is the source of all this fantasy-talk about posthumous reunion. That small irony makes me smile, now, because I know that Mom would have laughed at it.

She raised me. I know what made her laugh. She was my mother for forty-six years, and there's my proof.