At the airport

Today was a throwback day going to the airport.

When I was a kid, my dad worked for Xerox as an engineer.  Being a poet with no interest in the hard sciences, I had no idea (or to be frank, any interest) in what he actually did at work, but I did enjoy listening to his accounts of the internecine office politics in a big corporation.  My dad’s stories were real-life plot lines from “Mad Men” and “Dilbert” with duplicitous peers, comrades in arms, and clueless bosses.  

Many years later, I cut to the chase and asked him what he did at Xerox, and it turned out to be extraordinarily cool: he managed a team that designed the packaging for Xerox’s products.  It’s like those contests that where kids have to package an egg in the least amount of materials to survive a drop from the roof of a school, except that my dad got paid to do it and could save Xerox millions of dollars by figuring out how to use 5% less cardboard in the package carrying their toner cartridges.

For some reason, my dad travelled a lot in his job and I guess he didn’t get to expense his airport parking, so after I got my drivers license, one of my jobs at home was to drop him off at DFW airport. It was about thirty minutes from Lewisville to the airport, and we had some nice father-son conversations on those trips.

I remember one time he said, “You know I love you, that’s always been the case, but now … now, you’re becoming interesting.”  

I think he said that around the time that I was dating a pretty girl with long legs who liked to wear fishnet stockings.  He was probably trying to figure out the math on how I had pulled that off.  If you could have seen what I looked like in those years, you’d have been stumped too. It was like the Collatz conjecture of teenage dating.

Anyway, getting dropped off at the airport was one of those things that people did way more in the seventies and eighties than they do today.  I think it’s less about the drop off and more about the inconvenience of getting picked up.  Easier to pay two dollars a day at a remote lot and not worrying about when your ride will get there.

But today, my wife told me that she would drop me off at the airport. It was nice: she gave me advice on mask-wearing in the crowds (“Wear the KN95 in the airport, then switch to the N95 on the plane.”), we calculated how much I would need to win at the WSOP for us both to retire (with the 60-40 split, I pretty much need to win the whole damn thing), and she told me that she was going to start cleaning out our junk room (we are junior grade hoarders, mostly because I am convinced that things like old Nintendo Wii cables can be resold on eBay [spoiler alert: they can’t]).

When we pulled up to the curb, she kissed me and wished me luck.  When I told her that I was probably not going to win the event and she would have to keep working, she smiled and told me she was okay with that.  She then told me to pinch the nose piece tight on my mask and I waved goodbye.

As my dad liked to say about her, she’s a keeper. And for her, I hope I win the whole damn thing.