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The airport is a place where you will see many people Doing Their Best. It’s crowded, it’s expensive, it’s confusing, the departure boards are getting harder to read because you are 44 and your eyesight is gently beginning to falter. There are many reasons the airport can be stressful (have I peed enough times?) and somehow there are always lots of people who are being kind and strong and clever and polite even as they hang on by a thread from drop-off to baggage claim. The single mom muscling her toddler’s stroller off the security belt, trying to soother her newborn while the agent rips apart her diaper bag to take out and throw away a 5oz tube of rash creme. She is doing an amazing job. The Hudson kiosk agent telling me sorry no—they only have plain m&ms, who gets up at 4 every morning to make her kids’ lunches and then make it to her shift. She is Doing Her Best. The 80-year-old couple chatting the ear off the transport cart driver who is giving them a lift to their gate while they steady their matching walkers across the seat laps and rest their hands like knurled whale flippers on their knees. They deserve everything. The flight attendants gossiping in between flights on a long turnaround, and then eventually going silent—sipping their drinks and letting their eyes rest into the distance. They are a kind of heroine. The family working together to google translate the signs, the chaperones attentively and constantly surveying their gaggle of mischief-prone charges, the exhausted and dusty backpackers, the cellists, the hungover, the anxious, the funeral goers, the broken-up-with, the new life seekers, the old life fleers, the college drop-outs, the college freshmen. The poor cellists. There are exceptions of course, but most of the time it seems like all these people understand that the airport is a common struggle. A force not to be fought against, but to surrender to and be swept along through, troubleshooting along the way, picking up someone’s phone for them, leaving room in lines for cross-traffic, smiling at other people’s children, thanking the bartenders. While air travel is admittedly more of a privileged mode of travel, there is still something democratizing about the airport. We’ve walk through like zombies and recognize that we’ve all been (or will be) where someone else is now. And we all have the same goal (get the hell out of here). And so the average ethos in this place skews ever so slightly toward a harried humanism. And there aren’t many places like that anymore. We are doing our best.
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