The Sort of Things People Say in Airports

Or: Vignettes of a Quite Ordinary Journey, Part 1

In general, of course, people do not say much in airports. I myself never say anything but "Excuse me" or "Thank you," regarding the place as inherently unsuitable for human interaction. An airport waiting area contains a large collection of impatient, flustered and bored people who do not know one another, have no wish ever to know one another, and have nothing in common save the desire to get to St. Louis. The things that may be said in this context are those that are sure to meet with almost universal agreement, cannot possibly offend anyone, and refer to nothing that is not general knowledge. Even the weather, ordinarily an eminently safe topic, may provoke distress, as all weather that is worth talking about is associated with the evils of airport delays; its like talking about root canals in the dentist's office.

It was, therefore, interesting to hear what people said in airport waiting rooms the morning after the election. Staring up at the television screens which constantly and soundlessly proclaimed the news of the Democratic victory, people exchanged the pleasantries of self-satisfaction.
"I'm ordinarily a Republican, but I must say they got what they deserved."
"Did you hear that Rumsfeld resigned? He should have done it a long time ago."
"Whichever side you're on, you have to admit that the system worked," one particularly grandiose man opined. "That's the way our Founding Fathers designed it: if people aren't happy, things have to change." (Though wincing on James Madison's behalf, I said nothing.)

The overall feeling was one of mutual complacency: we, the people, had kicked the bums out, and this being done, we could all congratulate ourselves and go on about our business. If people were secretly elated, disappointed, or anxious, they concealed these feelings as unfit for airport consumption. It would have been quite improper to note that the change of defense secretaries could have no effect on the continuing chaos in Iraq, or that the Democrats are just as corrupt and childish as the Republicans. Civilized life requires that we take our politics seriously, but not too seriously.

This is the use of memory . . .

I have recently returned from my first visit to my alma mater since graduation. Before I review Cyrano or say what a lovely time I had (it was marvelous, and I did), I hope you will tolerate another slightly angsty, partially coherent post. (At least you have been fairly warned).

I left PHC, six months ago, in anger and in bitter disappointment. As it is my custom to disguise pain with vague coolness and, where that fails, sarcasm, those of you who never roomed with me probably do not know how angry I can get. But be assured, I was mad. And it was hard to leave the place that way, with nothing resolved and nothing forgiven.

Since then, I have struggled with forgiveness, for knowing that you must forgive and saying "All right, God, I forgive him" is not the same thing as actually forgiving. Nor is trying to look at things from the other person's perspective, or shoving the pain in a corner somewhere where you don't have to look at it. Forgiveness is a kind of death, the surrender of one's right not to be hurt, of one's right to assert any claim against another person, a surrender that is never complete but must be repeated daily, hourly. And I am very bad at it. "Who are you to judge another man's servant? To his own master he must stand or fall, and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand."

Returning to PHC, I was afraid that the bitterness of that last semester would taint every good memory of the place. But instead the bitterness itself seemed irrelevant and utterly past. And it was good. I went to all of my old haunts and recited this section of T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, which I had run across a couple weeks before, and which seemed fitting somehow.

" . . . This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, into another pattern.

"Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But some of peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them; . . .
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them,
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded into a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching."

Perhaps, in the end, forgiveness is nothing other than hope: the steadfast conviction that all things will be redeemed. I do not need to make things right, because God will do that in ways I cannot imagine. Or perhaps this vague, universal hope is another poor substitute for forgiveness. I don't know; I seem to know less and less all the time. But God knows. And all shall be well.

"You look just like the White Witch of Narnia!"

- yelled from the front row by a ten-year-old boy as I, dressed in Liberty Ball gown and tiara, was dramatizing King Nebuchadnezzer's rage at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. ("How dare they speak that way to me?! I am the king!! Throw them in the furnace!"). It was "dress like what you want to be when you grow up" night at Awana, so I explained that I'd always wanted to be a queen, so I could throw people who annoy me into furnaces.

I choose to take the comment as a compliment.