Killing Time at ORD

Part 5—Wednesday 5/29/24:

TSA might be watching. The age-old question: am I killing (a.k.a. wasting) time, or is it time to kill? My back faces the glass wall overlooking the runway, only one person can see my screen. He’s the older dude sitting next to me. About my age, only much cooler. He’s got that bald-head-gray-beard thing going on. I’ve often thought about going for that look, maybe with a hoop earring like Ed Bradley, only I can’t stand wearing a beard. I might as well be swaddled in wool undergarments. It feels like scabies crawl under my skin.

Susan and I flew into Chicago O’Hare last night at 7:00. Twenty-five minutes after our connection to Harrisburg left. We had a mechanical delay in Missoula and then severe thunderstorms kept us in the air in Chicago. When we landed, bright sunshine glistened through the plane windows. The tarmac looked dry to me. I wondered why we didn’t land sooner. It’s clear that our connecting flight had no trouble taking off.

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Part 1—Saturday 5/25/24

They tell me these protective feelings never go away. That’s what the seniors tell me. I work with a bunch of them on a volunteer initiative at my job. “She’s you’re daughter. You’ll always worry about her.” I flew to Missoula, Montana this morning. Hung out at Starbucks, waiting for Susan and Sophie to arrive. They drove here. If you know much about U. S. geography, you’re thinking Pennsylvania to Montana, that’s a long-ass drive! Yup, 2,225 miles. Thirty-three hours. Three long days in the car. Or as they did it, two super long days and a moderate day. We still need to unpack the car. A week ago, she still hadn’t graduated college.

How can I not worry about her?

A cab dropped me off at her apartment. The neighborhood is mostly industrial, as I already knew from looking online. I peeked through her window. The efficiency apartment is small, as I already knew from looking online. Sophie rented the place sight unseen. She did her best to judge her neighborhood and her square footage. Industrial and small, that’s what we came up with, but she was under the gun. Her job starts in three days.

Susan called, how’s her neighborhood? How’s her apartment? I changed the subject.

Part 2—Unpacked

Sophie’s apartment is great, hard to judge through a window with no furniture. Now that we have her bed set up, the only piece we could cram in her car, it’s clear she has plenty of room for all the furniture she needs, once she finds it. Other surprises: a patio large enough for a couple of Adirondack chairs and some potted plants; separate locked storage room for her bike and other large awkward items she doesn’t want in her apartment; off-street parking just feet from her patio door.

Part 3—Facebook Marketplace

Marketplace is both a gift and a curse. Fifteen-dollar vacuum; twenty-dollar bookshelf; free dresser; ten-dollar barstools:

Me: Hi, are the barstools still available?
Her: Hi, yes they are 🙂
Me: I’d like them. I could come now or sometime tomorrow.
Her: (twenty-four hours later) Great, when are you available today?
Me: I can come now or anytime really.

She never responded. Barstools notwithstanding, with her Marketplace scores and a forty-dollar recliner from the “Donation Warehouse” a block from her apartment, her place is already fully furnished.

Part 4—ISO caffeine-free cola:

Christ, I’m jonesing for a soda. A couple of months ago, I wrote about how after I gave up my Tourette medication, I needed to give up caffeine to keep my Tourette symptoms from going berserk. My transition was less difficult than I expected. I switched to decaf coffee with virtually no headaches, jitters, nausea or hallucinations. My other occasional dose of caffeine, Diet Coke, I swapped out for the caffeine-free variety—I’m working on an advertising campaign for them: No calories, no caffeine, just water and chemicals. I have no trouble finding this in Pennsylvania. I popped into every convenience store and gas station in Missoula. They only carry the caffeinated version. Same with O’Hare airport. It’s a conspiracy! It’s discrimination! When I get home at 11:30 tonight, Susan will go straight to bed. I’ll follow after I drink a soda.

Part 6—Someone else’s money

We’re wards of United Airlines for twenty-four hours. No flights out of Chicago last night. Nothing that could get us within 120 miles of home. They put us up in a hotel. Told us not to worry about spending money, they will cover all our expenses. After our sixty-four-dollar cab ride to the hotel and our comped dinners of cobb salads and French fries, the desk worker told us that he had sixty-nine rooms rented to stranded travelers. Add in our twenty-five-dollar Starbucks breakfast, our forty-dollar convenience store wraps and chips, our eight dollar bagels for dinner, and our god-knows-how-expensive hotel room, I’m positive United Airlines has paid more for our missed flight than we paid our flights in the first place. With so many disrupted flights, yesterday must have been a giant net loss.

Part 7—Terminal

Susan and I have been in O’Hare all day. I’m starting to feel a bit like Tom Hanks in the movie Terminal. Do you know this movie? An Eastern European man spends eight years in an airport terminal, refused entry to France and unable to return to his own country due to a coup. Clearly, I’m exaggerating, but literally all we have done since noon yesterday is sit in airports or airplanes trying to get home on a domestic flight. We arrived early at the airport today hoping to slip onto a mid-day flight to Harrisburg. We waited until the flight boarded at two o’clock to find that only two of the five standby passengers got onboard. We’re now at our gate, an hour before boarding time for our evening flight. Fingers crossed that our plane gets off without a hitch. Neither of us can afford another day off work.