There you are, lining up with what appears to be several hundred other people. You are wearing a jacket, a backpack is slung over your shoulder and you have a carry-on-bag too. You are approaching the larger than human size white frame x-ray that you must walk through. Before you do, however, you must put your carry-on bag, backpack, jacket, belt, coins from your pockets, and yes, your shoes in a small plastic container and push it onto the conveyor belt which carries your belongings into an MRI for stuff. Then, and only then, are you beckoned to pass into the frame. You catch your breath and hope that no buzzer sounds as you go through. All this time other travelers are going before and after you. You must be patient with those who are ahead of you, and you must not turn around and slug the man behind you. He seems to be in a rush, elbows flaying, hot breath forcing his path. Your physical discomfort does not prevent you from thinking about cattle passing into an abattoir. The airport security personnel lounging around the machines appear like the stockyard workers, bored and disinterested.
You are through the x-ray machine without setting off the alarm. Now you must claim your backpack, carry-on-bag, coins, belt and shoes from the conveyor belt where your stuff has been jammed into a pile with the couple’s who have gone before and so has that of the sweating man in a hurry behind you. He pushes against your back as you wait for the people ahead of you to gather their things and, picking up their shoes, move into the terminal. You have only an instant to notice that the woman has stepped into her shoes as she hops along, one hand on her husband’s arm. The man, however, looks stricken, holding his shoes and bags as he desperately looks for a place to sit down. Now it’s your turn. You too hobble along, trying to juggle you bags, put on your belt, pocket your change and avoid the man behind you., carrying your sneakers, fashionably high, red, with laces, long laces!
By the time you find a chair, one wedged between people waiting at a gate to board their flight, and have laced up your shoes, you begin to fear you will miss your flight. Having tied your shoes and gathered your belongings — and reenter the concourse where you can at last try to locate your departure gate — you are a nervous wreck. When you locate the gate where your fellow passengers look like patients in the waiting room of a dentist you see the man who had followed you thought the x-ray machine. And you know, with a certainty unusual in your easy going nature, that he was going to sit next to you on the flight.
While it will not change much, next time you fly wear loafers. Bon voyage.
