Too much time at airports..

                                              A rainy Heathrow Airport this morning.

I sat down today and worked out that I have been to airports in London, New York, Newark, Florida, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Capetown, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Baltimore, Connecticut, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Milan, Rome, Verona, Pisa, Israel, Athens, Jordan, Aruba, Curacao, Paris, Barcelona, Dallas and possibly more. 

In each of these airports I have spent a number of hours.  I have visited many of the airports multiple times.  I cannot begin to calculate how many hours, days or weeks of my life have been spent arriving, departing, waiting, delivering people, meeting people, hugging and crying.

I really dislike airports.  They all seem designed to engender a bland form of anxiety in everyone.  Whenever I go to the airport, as I did today, I feel anxious and unnerved by the lighting, the design, the ambient temperature, the multiple announcements and signage.  All of it irritates me.  This may be because I associate airports more with goodbyes than anything else. Today my daughter went back to California.  I'll see her and my son for two nights in early June in Cincinnatti for a family wedding, then we'll head for another airport, hug, kiss, shed a surreptitious tear and off we fly again.  It seems to have always been this way.

My first flight was in 1968.  I went travelling alone through Europe and Israel.  I was 19 years old.  My entire family , whole carloads, came to what was then Idlewild Airport to say goodbye.  I felt like Ingrid Bergman in 'Casablanca' - as if I was flying off somewhere never to return.  I had two enormous suitcases and this was pre-wheeled cases!  The drama surrounding my departure was heightened by my parents fears about my heading for Europe, the place of all their terror and sadness.  They really did make me feel as if I was saying goodbye forever, instead of for eight weeks.

I flew first to Israel, then Athens, then Rome.  I was flying back to New York from Amsterdam and by then I had met Ralph, fallen madly in love and was saying goodbye to him at Schipol Airport.  it really was a Romeo and Juliet love scene.  Tears, kisses, hugs, looking back over shoulders, more embraces and finally goodbye.  We didn't see each other for four months.

Four months later I was again at an airport in New York on a charter flight to London.  I was flying from a distant terminal reserved for cattle class passengers on Saturn Airways (?) on Christmas eve.  We were delayed for an impossible number of hours. The airport staff were drunk, rowdy and busy partying - not a lot of customer service.

In those early charter flight days the delays were hours and hours and I can remember sleeping on airport floors and frantically looking for places to sit. When my daughter was tiny we would fly to New York on the cheapest tickets possible and there was no such thing as compensation for delays.  I remember well discovering the Chapel at Gatwick Airport in London.  All heavy curtains, blue carpeting and padded pews.  Many was the comfortable hour we spent sleeping on those pews waiting for a delayed take-off.  At least the delays have changed, though the multi-faith rooms set aside for prayer now seem to be bare rooms with little comfort and no nice cosy pews for stretching out on.

In those days I always seemed to be saying goodbye and heading away from family and friends.  Airports became second-nature when I was flying back to New York every six weeks or so when my mum was ill.  There was no excitement around these trips, no sense of visiting great places and enjoying new tourist sites. At least the many trips during that sad time helped me get over any flying anxiety I might have had.  Now it seems mundane and boring.

I hate saying goodbye to friends, to family, to people and places I love.  My mum used to say she loved it when I arrived, but it made it harder to say goodbye all over again.  Just when she had become accustomed to my being away I would arrive and then have go allover again.  I don't feel quite like that.  I am always delighted to see my children and to see friends.  I just hate the goodbyes.

So, all these flights, all this time at airports.  Maybe it's time I start to enjoy them.  I thought today that I could begin to bring some mindfulness to my airport visits.  Instead of getting caught up in the fluorescent misery I could focus on the people, their stories, their emotions, the incredible wonder of the ability to fly off to exotic places so easily, the great donut shops, the miracle of variations on fast food in each country and the pleasure of seeing my loved ones.  It would certainly make a change from the irritable old sourpuss I become when I am in the vicinity of an airport.  Since I am flying out on Friday I might try a different approach.  I will endeavour to look forward to the airport experience.  Who knows, I might even enjoy it.