Life is hard. It’s an election year. As if the election season tightrope between discovering your friends are idiots whilst being accused by your friends of being an idiot isn’t enough, I have a missing cat. My granddaughter accidentally left an exterior door open recently. Two of our indoor babies disappeared into the void known as under the house. Hazel turned out to be an easy snatch & grab. Sweet Polly, however, has forgotten she ever lived in this thing we call a home. She snapped back into a feral mindset faster than I can eat a Ghirardelli dark chocolate square with raspberry filling. That’s an extremely fast feat. I should know. My husband bought me a whole bag of the chocolate things to try and keep me from crying myself to sleep every night over the missing cat thing. While I pray that Polly will be back to her snuggly indoor self by the time you read this, we are about to cross into a very sad day three. Just when I thought I might need to eat a few more chocolate squares, my daughter-in-law popped in to remind me that today was the anniversary of another hard day. Today, nine years ago, is the day we flew to Georgia with a baby.
As with any good tale, this one has a backstory. My son, her husband, had gotten a great job. It’s the same one he has now. It took him nearly 2 years to apply, complete all the checks and triple checks, and receive the offer. That’s when his employer (cough, government, cough) lowered the boom. His training would be held in Georgia. It would last for 6 months. They didn’t care that he was married or that his wife was 6 months pregnant. He would go alone. He would not be back to see his daughter born. That’s how we wound up booking
2 round-trip tickets to Georgia when the baby was 2 months old. It was time to go and see the baby’s daddy graduate from this training academy. Have you ever flown with a newborn?
In another life, I was a traveling sales trainer. I flew out every Monday and returned home each Friday. I know airports intimately. Never use LAX if you can fly into Burbank. Nothing makes a pilot more nervous than the deceptively steep San Diego airport, except maybe the airport in Telluride. If you check a bag regularly, you’d best be advised to make friends with the skycaps and take them homemade baked goods for Christmas. That 52 lb. suitcase will inexplicably weigh 48 lbs. in the blink of an eye. And the rule above all rules, the pièce de résistance of airport etiquette, for all that is holy in this world, learn how to go through TSA security effortlessly.
This is present-day me in the security line at the airport. I have my boarding pass ready to go on my phone, though there is a printed pass tucked nicely in between the pages of my passport, next to my photograph. Never rely solely on electronics. I am dressed comfortably in clothing with no metal parts. My jewelry is zipped up securely in a crossbody purse that I can fling into a plastic bin in 2.3 seconds. I am wearing slip-on shoes with socks. My laptop is out of my carry-on suitcase and ready for bin #2. My carefully labeled and measured liquids are in a 1-qt. Ziploc bag millimeters from my fingertips. My sweater is off once I reach the halfway mark in line. I am a well-oiled machine. Bin on conveyer. Place shoes + liquids. Bin on conveyer. Place electronics. Suitcase comes next. Wait for the manual conveyor to turn into the moving conveyor. Get in line. Wait for the agent to make eye contact. In the tube. Arms up. Legs at hip width. Neck straight. Chin level. Exit tube. Wait for a verbal cue. Seamlessly take my 2 bins and my single suitcase and find an out-of-the-way area to regroup. This is how it’s done, folks. I am the airport security queen. Hear me roar.
This was not our 2015 experience! TSA did not care how prepared I was, how metal-free I was, or how composed I remained. They were nonplussed when we offered them printed materials from their own website that stated we didn’t have to allow them to open every single bottle of premade baby formula we were bringing on the plane. They did not care if said formula would need to be discarded if not used in 4 hours. They did not care that it was impossible to find in stores. They were unfazed by our pleas to not wake the baby. They insisted on touching my 2-month-old granddaughter’s face and turning her head from side to side to make sure she was an actual baby and not a faux baby stuffed with drugs. They insisted we all be both scanned by tube and by wand. How dare we fly to Georgia with a baby.
All this to say that simple things are often hard. Things we try hardest to control often go off the rails the quickest. Life has a way of showing you who’s the bossiest of the bosses. Often, it isn’t you. Still, it’s universal. It happens to us all. Whether you have a domesticated cat currently under your house identifying as a feral cat, or a baby at the airport suspected of being a tiny drug mule, you’re not alone. But for crying out loud, take your security line game up a notch. Don’t be a barbarian.
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