Accommodation
What to say and how to say it?
Unable to write anything yesterday, waking in the predawn gray I handed the luggage over to the limo driver. The day began with the familiar ground-tone of anxiety, — I didn’t want to miss our flight. My mind flashed back to when I was a boy. In the days of propeller driven planes, Eastern airlines might have delayed an airliner departure for a few minutes, if the gate crew knew that you’d arrive shortly. Those days are long gone. Arrive on time for boarding, or make whatever alternative arrangements you can manage.
I put myself into the hands of our limo driver to convey us to the Delta airlines counter for check-in. We arrived on time.
To my relief a kindly attendant helped us manipulate our credit card into the check-in computer that dispenses the boarding passes and luggage check tags. Check-in is another “test” where someone else looks over your identification and decides whether you will be allowed to board the plane. For airline travel these days one’s “papers” have to be in order. The point is further pressed, a few minutes later as one approaches the security check line. There your boarding pass, ID documents are matched up with your face, and then you have the opportunity to step into the scanning machine. The TSA attendant may comport him or herself as your fellow citizen or as your uniformed overlord.
“By magic” you board a jet airline and several hours later deplane hundreds of miles elsewhere. Any number of officials decide, once you’ve paid for your ticket, if you will make the trip. Airline travel is synonymous with a string of drop-dead moments, tests that must be passed if you are to fly.
Accommodating to all of this may be difficult for me because I remember a day when distance travel by plane was by comparison informal. I well know that there is no point in wistfully wondering after the way things once were, — and can never be again. The world, both Nature, and that of human affairs has a logic of it’s own, an inexorability. One thing leads to another. Here we are in the present, as if deposited by a time machine.
Would you or I have imagined twenty years ago that almost everyone would have a personal communicator, an iphone? The device connects us in abstraction from most locations in the world. In the airport it appeared that most of those around me, were holding their phone in their hands.
Is this the iconic pose of the 21st century man or woman? If one of the old masters were to paint one of us, is this the form that he’d surely paint?
