Airport Reflections

Stuck in an airport (or 3) and a plane (or 2) gives me great time to think. Or, more acurately, gives me too much time for my mind to wander. Yesterday my brain was zooming from one thought to another like an ADHD 3 year old on a sugar buzz. Of course, trying to keep my jumbled train of thoughts far away from the sad reality of leaving just made it worse.

So, I tried to focus on 2 reflections that were made by co-teachers of mine. (We're all frequent fliers, in our situation, so we swap lots of airport stories!)

Comment #1: "I feel like a minority at the Detroit airport!" Well, Dave & I definitely feel more like minorities living in Mexico than in Detroit. But airports are an interestingly diverse group of people. And I really like that diversity. I like sharing the plane with a black family and a rabbi and muslim women in hijabs and businesspeople and little kids and retirees and housewives and students. I like making people wonder which of those categories I fit into ;) I like eavesdropping on Spanish conversations pretending I have no idea what's going on. I like looking at people's shoes and luggage and guessing where they're from and what they do for a living. So I spent a lot of time, this trip, people watching and people guessing in order to avoid any sort of reflection on my own life.

Comment #2: "There's almost never any women in first class." I had never really paid any attention to who was in first class until very recently. I wasn't sitting there, no one I knew sat there, so it was almost an invisible group to me. But then my DH & I started getting upgrades, and so did my parents, and so did a few of my friends - one of whom made this comment about being the only woman in first class. So now I always look. And I always count. Tuesday, there were 2 american women in first class from Detroit to New York. One was half of a couple, and one was clearly a business woman. But, as this flight was barely half-full, it's very likely that both were upgrades from "business class" and had not purchaed full-price first class tickets. There were 4 Mexican women on the flight from JFK to DF, and none of them were "business"women. This was a very full flight, mainly families going on vacation, and I'm pretty sure each of those women were in first class because a man in their family (husband, father, brother) made enough money to purchase those seats for them. Seems very odd that the richer country does not have enough women who can "afford" first class, but the poorer country does. Also very ironic, I was reading a book on both flights about how mothers are pushed out of the American workplace.

Now, back to "real" life. Whatever that means.