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Traveling

Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Even before the pandemic, stand up comics, who took to the air to entertain the rest of us with their clever observations, often spent considerable time describing the absurdities of airline travel.

The process, as each airline and each airport appears to have somewhat different rules, has become even more bizarre.

Each airline has its own baggage limitations. For some larger planes, you can take one carry-on and one personal bag. For some smaller planes, however, especially if you’ve bought the cheapest seats on smaller flights, which we do as a rule, you can only bring one carry-on. You can’t even get a boarding pass unless someone comes and inspects the size of your bag.

Once you have your boarding pass, you head to security with your mask on.

The first screener who checks boarding passes and IDs has to have one of the harder jobs. Everyone is trying to catch a plane, which means that, even if they are early, they are still under time pressure. Many feel the need to share their sense of urgency with people who fly under the radar in our lives unless something goes wrong. When these security agents do their jobs well, we expect it, and when they don’t, we are outraged, frustrated, annoyed and irritable. It’s a bit like being a referee or an effective traffic cop.

Anyway, we shuffle up to the line with the largest possible bag that won’t require checking. When we get to the front, we hand our ID and ticket over, wait for the cue, and then lower our masks.

I like watching people lower their masks. Many feel the need to smile, as if the person is taking a picture of them. It’s ironic because the photo from a driver’s license or a passport looks much more like a 6 a.m. mug shot than a, “this-is-me, this-is-my-face, I’m-about-to-go-somewhere-awesome smile.”

Every so often, someone is selected for random additional screening. On a recent trip, they checked my wife’s phone on the way out and my phone on the way back.

During that trip, one of the conveyer belts that enables the screener to look at x-rays of our underwear was moving especially slowly. Each time a new person approached the conveyor belt, that person could and sometimes did push his or her huge suitcase ahead of the ones from the people who were ahead of them.

Fortunately for me, I travel with a small but powerful force of nature, also known as my wife. She doesn’t allow dysfunctional systems to slow us down, even if that involves shaming people who are trying to shove their suitcases ahead of the ones on the belt.

My wife was so effective that the system not only worked as it should for the few minutes we stood there, but a TSA agent jumped in to reinforce what my wife was doing.

Once we get on a plane, the battle for overhead space begins, with the special people getting first dibs on that space while the people in the last groups get the leftovers. It’s so Darwinian: people who spend extra money are the Alpha Fliers, while those who fly economy get the scraps, with flight attendants telling them to gate check their allowable luggage, which will hopefully be waiting for them on the jetway when we arrive.

People jockey for position at baggage check, where they want to stand directly on a line with the ramp that delivers their luggage magically from below. I’m sure that magic requires considerable lifting and hefting from the people we rarely see.

The final competitive positioning occurs at the curb, where the faces of tired fliers often look much more like the pictures from their IDs than the faces they make at the beginning of their trips. The tired fliers stare at approaching vehicles, looking for their Ubers, family members, or buses to bring them back to their world.

METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Flying? Are we really flying? Well, sure, why not, right? Everyone else is flying.

Wait, then again, everyone else seems to be flying. What if one of those other people is sick? Don’t think too much about it and breathe through your nose. Oh, you can’t because the two masks you’re wearing are pinching your nose? Well, tough! 

They’re serving drinks and cookies? People have to lower their masks to eat and drink, right? So, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of mandatory masks? Look away from everyone who’s breathing. Yeah, that’ll help.

Okay, finally, we’re on the ground. 

Hey, this is a nice campus. The sidewalks are packed and filled with so much energy, not all of which is positive.

“Why are all these $#@! parents here this weekend? I have several tests and I don’t need them all staring at me!”

That girl is sharing her academic anxiety with her friend and anyone else within 100 feet of her. Subtle, real subtle! Tempted as I am to let her know that parents, likely including her own, make this sometimes miserable experience possible, I refrain. She might be my son’s current or future friend.

I ask two students for the location of a building. The first shrugs and points me in the wrong direction and the second nearly draws a map. Okay, one for two.

I sit just in time for the start of a talk by successful alumni, who connect their careers to the lessons they learned at school. Clever marketing! Other parents chuckle at the jokes. I imagine these parents as college students. In my mind, the presenters onstage become Broadway performers. Each of the two men and two women, which I presume is a well-planned balance of genders, does his or her rendition of “how I succeeded,” with the subtext, just feet from the school president, of, “keep paying those tuitions!”

When the session ends, the phone rings. It’s my son! He’s strolling across a lawn. Wait, is that really him? Much as I want to run over and squeeze him, I play it cool, congratulating myself on my impulse control. Well done, Dan. You haven’t embarrassed him so far, but the weekend is young yet, even if you are not. He adjusts his hair, a move I’ve seen him and almost all his friends do frequently, even while running back and forth on a basketball court. What’s with all the hair adjustment? I quietly ask for permission to hug him. Yay! He agrees. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and fight the urge to pick him up, which is probably best for my back.

As we head to his dorm, he tells me he hasn’t done laundry in nine days. I don’t know whether that’s a hint, as in, “Dad, while you’re here…” or a statement of fact.

We part company and I learn about the evolving world of the commercialization of college athletes, who can use their name, image and likeness to make money. He’s listening to a psychology lecture about, who else, Sigmund Freud.

At a football game, I wonder how it can be this cold in Louisiana. Aren’t we in the deep south? We leave before it’s over, waiting in the cool air for 11 minutes for an expensive Uber — they must know it’s parents weekend — to take two families who are heading back to the same hotel.

10 pm. Who eats this late? I’m usually half way to sleep by now. My older brother is undoubtedly already in REM sleep. My stomach is going to hate this. Shut up stomach!

Looking around the table at these families, one thing is clear: these parents adore their children.

This is part of the story of how these boys got here and, hopefully, will help them continue to learn lessons, like how to dress for a cold football game and how to make reservations in advance before a busy parents weekend so we can eat earlier.

Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I’m not much of a planner. I put together professional plans, creating a schedule for stories I’d like to research and write, and I coordinate calls and meetings all week, but I don’t tend to go through the calendar to figure out when to visit socially with friends and family or to attend cultural events.

This summer, however, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to look at the calendar and consider a wide range of activities that would have been difficult or impossible a year ago.

I’m delighted to plan to visit with my extended family. I haven’t seen my brothers in over 19 months. I have visited with them on the phone and zoom, but that’s not nearly the same thing as seeing them in person, throwing a ball with them, flying a kite off the beach or just sitting on the couch and having a free-flowing conversation.

I am also delighted to consider planning a trip to museums. On one of our first dates, my wife and I went to the Metropolitan Museum, where we wandered slowly through the exhibits, continuing to build on our relationship even as we studied the artifacts left behind by the generations that fell in love and married hundreds of years earlier. I recall wandering through those wide hallways close to a quarter of a century ago, listening to my wife’s stories and delighting in laughter that, even now, provides validation and meaning to each moment.

I am hoping to travel to Washington, D.C., this summer, to see the air and space museum. Each of the planes hovers overhead, and the space capsules from the early days of the NASA program are inspirational, giving me a chance to picture the world from a different vantage point, seeing the shimmering blue waters that cover the Earth.

I have watched planes fly overhead throughout the pandemic, but I haven’t ventured to the airport or onto a plane. I’m looking forward to the opportunity that flight provides to turn trips that would take over 10 hours into one- or two-hour flights.

Visiting family, friends and strangers in different areas, eating foods that are different and unfamiliar and experiencing life outside of the small circles in which we’ve restricted ourselves opens up the possibilities for the summer and beyond.

My son can prepare for the start of college and my daughter for a return to college with the hope that they can enjoy more of the academic, social, extracurricular and community service experiences that they imagined when they envisioned these years of growth, development and, hopefully, independence.

I spoke with a scientist recently who told me that the inspiration for a work he’d just completed came from a conversation he had during a conference a few years ago. He had been sitting in an auditorium, listening to a speech, when he and a stranger exchanged thoughts about the implications of the work. From that interaction, he started a new project that became a productive and central focus of his research efforts. As soon as conferences are back on the calendar, he hopes to return to the road, where such unexpected and unplanned conversations can trigger inspiration.

To be sure, I recognize that the realities of travel and planning don’t always dovetail with the hopes and expectations. I recently visited with our extended community at a social gathering, where I stood downwind of someone who wore so much cologne that I couldn’t taste the food I was eating.

I’m sure there’ll also be lines, traffic jams and literal and figurative turbulence as I leave our home cocoon. 

Still, this summer, I’ll be grateful for the opportunity to do so much, including and especially, the chance to plan.

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Everyone knows about the doctor who was forcibly removed from his place on a United Airlines plane when no one volunteered to give up seats to accommodate a flight crew traveling to another airport. Fortunately for the doctor, another passenger videoed the event, and the video went viral. The public outrage that followed is prompting congressional hearings, new rules within the airline industry and new laws regarding removal by police of an unwilling passenger.

I think it is fair to say that the reaction to the incident is one of total disbelief that such an act could happen here in the United States. The callousness and utter disregard for the safety of the man, incidentally a paying customer, are astonishing.

Yet here is another story, closer to home and less violent, of insensitivity to customers. I was riding the Long Island Rail Road home from Penn Station on a weekday afternoon, expecting the usual change at Huntington for Port Jefferson, when an announcement over the public address system advised us that the connecting train was arriving across the tracks on the south side of the station. We were told to use the stairs to cross over if we wanted to continue east.

It seemed a bit of an inconvenience until we walked down the platform to the stairway and found the entrance blocked. Turning around to find the next closest stairway over the tracks, I saw that some of the passengers behind me were using walkers or canes. As they saw the locked gate to the stairs, they became frantic. The next crossover was a half block down the platform. Did you ever witness people with walkers and canes trying to run? The sight is pathetic. And the rest of us didn’t look too graceful, huffing and puffing our way to try and catch the waiting train.

The stairs were steep to the top of the overpass, and the passages on the south side leading back down to the platform and to the parking lot were confusing. We ran by an elevator, and some of us pressed the button, but it took what seemed like forever to arrive. Once inside, we were confronted with different buttons that were labeled, each with an ambiguous letter. We pushed the wrong button and wound up on the ground floor. Breathless at this point, we rushed back up the stairs to the platform just in time to see the train pulling away. Those with the walkers and canes, as well as those of us too slow to navigate in time, perhaps a dozen in total, were left to wait the hour and a half until the next train. The moans were loud.

There is, of course, pressure on the engineers and conductors to keep to a schedule. A regular report grades the on-time performance of the LIRR, and there is much disgruntlement when the trains are habitually late. So there was reason for the train to pull away before all the passengers had crossed the tracks. But where was the caring? Some of the passengers were lame. Some were old. Some were just out of shape for a sudden dash up, around and down the granite stairways. It would have taken perhaps another two minutes for the rest of the group to reach the train.

Where was the respect for the paying customer?

Perhaps this sort of disregard is inevitable in a monopolistic situation. There is no other train line to use. There aren’t that many different airlines left in our country after the assorted mergers. Or is it something else, something having to do with our society as a whole? Yes, in many ways we have become more tolerant over the past century, more accepting of differences. We have also become more relaxed, less formal in our dealings with each other — and not in a negative way. But there are some aspects of previous generations that are sadly scarce. I could name a few: politeness, honor, civility, patience, respect. We rush around a lot, but I’m not sure we always get where we want to be. And if we don’t rush, we get left behind.