Tag: airports

You sweep ideas from the floor like so much left-over rubbish.

 

As part of training, we made weekend trips interstate and met with other candidates in Sydney and from Adelaide. We flew to Sydney on the Saturday morning and arrived home late Sunday. 

On one such return my husband met me at the airport bustling with weekend returnees, each shop bright and shining like the cosmetics counter at Myer. It’s a joke in my family. I do like travel, to go too far from home for too long but the smell and bustle of airports thrills me with an indescribable longing. It is enough for me to drive to the airport and hang about with people who are queuing up to leave or to wait in the arrivals lounge for international travellers and watch as weary people emerge through the sliding doors of customs loaded with cases and pushing heavy trolleys and scanning the crowd for a loved one or anyone they might recognise to ferry them home. 

It’s always home I imagine, though many people arrive here for holidays. The holidays makers are obvious and don’t attract my attention the way family reunions release tears from the back of my eyes. 

It must have to do with those early visits to Essendon airport when I was a child. The silver plane taxied onto the tarmac, and we watched from inside as travellers straggled along the tarmac. Among them my grandfather, my aunt and her new husband, her children. Another uncle who had spent years first in the Belgian Congo then in Indonesia on rubber plantations. They arrived in Australia for six weeks once every few years and created an atmosphere of such joy, especially for my mother.

 I associated their arrival with aeroplanes and airports. Equally the day they left and returned home and my mother’s abjection, especially when her father flew off that last time, and she knew she would never see him again. 

Airports are like this, replete with human triumphs of connection and despair. The despair that comes of loss and disconnection. 

We had been to Sydney for a weekend of seminars and while there my husband rang to tell me one of our colleagues told us her husband had reported her children had picked up lice at school. 

In the arrivals lounge people milled around. Her daughter ran to hug her, but she pushed her aside. How heartless to treat her daughter as though she had leprosy and could not be touched. 

A week later we discovered our daughters also had lice. A common enough occurrence in the transition between winter and summer and its reverse. The nit nurse arrived at school to check the heads of girls to make sure each child’s parents complied with the protocol of nit removal. 

Kp7, a foul-smelling petroleum-based lotion to fumigate the head, left on for ten minutes, a good rinse out then the arduous comb through with a fine-tooth metal nit comb. Under a bright light to avoid missing any. 

We hated the process, parents, and children alike, but it became routine. One I described to my analyst Mrs Milanova in a session the following week. It was a Monday after a weekend of nit removal which I told her about in detail. 

The next day I came and saw she had put an extra pillowcase on top of the pillow where I usually rested my head.

I was incensed. Didn’t she know I had treated my hair and my husband’s hair along with our children’s as we were advised? Didn’t she know my husband had checked my hair and I his to be sure neither had nits? Didn’t she know I was vigilant and continually assessing the state of my daughters’ hair to be sure they were free of nits? And here she was treating me as though I might have them.

‘It’s a precaution,’ she said, after I objected to the extra pillowcase. And I knew she was thinking of the others, the ones who came before and after me and I hated her for it. I hated them for it. I wanted to be the only one, or at least not to be reminded so blatantly that I was the infected one, the one she needed to protect others from. 

In retrospect I can see the overreaction of my feelings. But my sensitivity to anything coming my way from Mrs Milanova’s words or hands left me prone to fits of shame so vast, you could fill a room.  Nits were nothing. 

On airports, colour blindness and time alone

People laugh at my passion for airports. I visit them with pleasure for drop offs and pickups but prefer not to pass through to other places. Unless I have to. 

We drove out this morning to farewell my husband. He’s off to Bali with friends for ten days. Early enough and more so given we lose an hour to slip into daylight savings.

A six am start was actually a five am start in the old money. An overcast day so the light broke without any sun to be seen and modest temperatures, typical of spring, a strange even-handedness in the air despite the sense that winds would re-erupt soon enough once whatever change in store eventuated. 

I had thought I’d arrive home and go straight back to sleep. Equally, I thought I’d be wide awake, too awake to let sleep return and so it is. 

The airport is already a blur. Every time I visit some new reconstruction has affected the layout. The doors that opened and shut like a shark’s jaws have now been replaced by automatic pass through entrances and exits as at train stations. 

Before we left, as my husband slipped a light jumper over his head in readiness for the day and his trip, I found myself looking at his shoes on our bedroom floor. A row of Keens shoes, comfortable shoes that he prefers to buy in multiples. Not one pair but two.

They are well worn and much loved but not over-worn and the openings into which my husband slips his feet when empty now look like a choir of open mouths. The one squished together in a grin, another a full circle of astonishment, a third more a scream. 

A contrast to the bright white open bustle of the airport. 

A year ago, I bought a special pair of sunglasses for my husband’s birthday. Glasses that allow the colour blind to see colour. There are a series of you tube clips in the advertising site for Enchroma glasses for people who see colour for the first time and they sometimes weep. 

My husband was more restrained when on the evening of his birthday he first tried them out. These were sunglasses. He needed full sun to enjoy them.

Even the next day he seemed lacklustre in his enthusiasm, as was my grandson who tried on these glasses, too. 

My grandson is also colour blind. It runs in families, carried by the females but copped by the males.

A year later, this morning, my husband told me he had packed his Enchroma sunglasses and my heart sang a little song of joy to imagine the pleasure he might find in Bali when he sees the colours of that island more clearly than ever before.