First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Beach Bars

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Here’s a secret.  The most inspiring connections can be found in mundane places. 
Here’s another secret: people hate me at most airports in the country.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  Me, on barely any sleep, which means I say whatever pops into my head.  I’m honestly very entertaining when I travel. 

So picture a groggy girl in a very flashy airport, schlepping past beach bars, other bars, someplace called the “Caribbean Spirit Sun Wing,” and yes, a few more bars.  All very dazzling and it moves way too fast, as though my own body is on a different time zone. 

My only real objective here is to make it through security in time to see my friends off.  So here's a mental memo: never wear custom made t-shirts through an airport.  I know it sounds strange, but apparently they contain traces of ingredients used in the making of explosives.
Apparently that gives TSA fits.

I’m only vague aware of alarm bells.  (Hm?  Pretty noises.  Oh well, nothing to do with innocent me.)  Less vaguely aware that I’m instantly surrounded by my own personal escort of security agents.  

“You can’t go anywhere.  Don’t talk to anyone.”

Both shoes halfway on.  “Why are the alarms ringing?”

“Because your clothes contain traces of explosives.” 

Mental memo: EXCUSE ME?  

Huh.  I didn’t expect they’d actually tell me that.

So here’s what TSA does when they suspect you of sneaking bombs into the airport.
  1. You’re taken to one of those makeshift rooms to wonder why physicals cost so much when the TSA just gives them for free.
  2. You’re forbidden to answer your phone and let your friends know what happened.  You’re also forbidden to call out across the airport to them – this makes security cranky.
  3. You kind of just have to sit there and watch while they take every personal item out of your backpack, and scan it within sight of the entire airport. 
Like I hinted at, I know how to make a scene.

By this point, I really just want to catch up with my friends before they board their planes.  I’m also wondering how I forgot about the chocolates they pulled out of my bag, why TSA put my underwear under a scanner, and how the agent could possibly see pajamas as a threat to security. 

And why did they leave it spread all across the counter for everyone to stare at!?

“Look, I’m tiny.  Five feet barely.  Do I look like a threat to national security?”

“You teach women’s self-defense across the country?” 

Oh.  They found my business cards. 
Other mental memo: I could do with better timing.

Ok, one thing at a time here.  Stop unwrapping my lunch.  Give me back my phone, and put my pjs back before you broadcast my life’s story!  
“You bought yourself a shot glass?  How old are you anyway?”  My phone rings again.  My friends are boarding soon, and I can’t even tell them I’m stuck right around the corner.

And then another woman sees me.  We’ve never met before, but that doesn’t matter.  We have enough in common. 

We’re surrounded by security but she slips in besides me.  She asks in Yiddish, “Are you Jewish?” and that is all she needs.  Later, I found out that she found my friends for me.  That she told them, also in Yiddish, exactly what had happened. 

The woman hadn’t known me.  She’d just recognized another Jewish girl from somewhere across an airport.  I saw her as I left, and she smiled at me. 

This is what it means.  That we have this connection.  That strangers recognize each other amidst too many bars and jazzy distractions, and that we can speak out in our own secret language. 

So here's one more memo before I go to bed.  Anyone can go somewhere holy, and find something of meaning.  The trick is to find purpose in tanning salons and beach bars.

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