The days are longer now, the afternoons seeming to melt in the heat. A slight tack of sweat clings to my skin as I write this. The other evening, while making dinner, I watched mosquitoes resembling small hummingbirds knock against the kitchen window. Such are the signs that we’ve reached summer in St. Louis.
These things haven’t exactly snuck up, but they are surprising nevertheless. Maybe that’s because we returned a few days ago from a week up north, in Minnesota. We went up to visit family, among other things, on a trip we’d planned last winter. It would be good, we’d thought, to get the boy up to meet the other half of his people, in particular my wife’s grandmother, while she still has her health.
‘Of course we’ll fly up,’ we’d thought, with the delusional optimism of people who had not yet, in fact, given birth to said boy, nor come to fully appreciate his daily demands or the intricacies of navigating airport logistics with an infant.
It all felt quite a lot more complicated once we found ourselves rattling around an airport shuttle bus, half the luggage rack filled with our bags, and the boy strapped into the car seat we both clasped onto for dear life as the driver gassed it around the curves.
Somehow we made it though, and the three of us spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the terminal. We loaded up the boy, our backpacks, an oversized suitcase, the portable crib, the duffel bag stuffed full of milk paraphernalia, and all the other necessities we’d packed for this brief excursion. Schlepping our way up to the service desk, we commenced check-in. The agent informed us our big bag was overweight. We could still check it, he said, for a $100 fee. We proceed to the middle of the terminal, and began re-packing while the boy dozed, unaware.
It struck me that he won’t remember any of this. I didn’t fly myself until I was ten or so. It was something we’d looked forward to as kids. We’d heard all about it. My own dad traveled somewhat regularly for work. It always seemed faintly miraculous that he’d fly to other places we’d never been. On occasion when he returned, he’d bless us with snacks from the plane—the honey roasted peanuts somehow transubstantiated into something extraordinary for having traversed the ether, like foil-wrapped manna literally handed down from the sky.
My own first flight was a short one. We took off from St. Louis and landed in Chicago, a 45-minute jaunt we really could have driven. My family all chewed Wrigley spearmint at takeoff so our ears wouldn’t pop. In the brief span before we touched down, the attendants brought us full cans of soda, and our very own peanuts.
It seems funny to me, then, that the boy should be taking his first flight so early in his life. We didn’t have to buy him a ticket, but still—he didn’t appreciate it.
Maybe this is a generational thing, and it’s common now to board your first flight before you can walk. I like to think that I’m not so old, and that there’s not so much distance separating us. But recently I was thinking about how our birth years straddle a century. I thought how much different things must have been for people whose lives straddled the last turn of the century, like my own grandmother to her parents. I imagined someone else in the very far future looking back and seeing the decades that separate me from the boy, and that person understanding, both instantly and better than I do, how different my perspective must have been from my son. I hadn’t expected this about fatherhood. The way I think about time differently, or that now I feel distinctly part of a certain generation, papered into a stratum within a broader tree.
But even if the next generation is flying earlier, everyone is flying more, I suppose. I read the other day that the FAA safely shepherds something like 45,000 flights per day through the skies. I had to go back and check that figure, to make sure I’d remembered correctly. Surely, then, the boy will fly more in his lifetime. But how often? And for how long?
The first few days we were in Minnesota were gorgeous. It felt like we’d stepped back six weeks in the year. The air was cool, and we kept the windows open day and night for the breeze and birdsong. We even heard a loon.
Then, on Mother’s Day, the temperature shot up. In the course of an afternoon, it suddenly felt like St. Louis. There was an air quality alert on our phones, and we closed all the windows and turned on the A/C. That night, the sky went hazy from wildfires in Canada. The sun glowed red long before it set.
A few months ago, my grandma came over one afternoon to meet the boy for the first time. We were so excited for the moment. I handed him over so she could hold him, and she gently rocked him on the couch. “Just imagine,” she said, “all the things you’re going to see.”
Maybe then there will come a day when he no longer flies at all. Maybe no one will. We’re quietly resigned to it for now though, with our families spread the way they are. It’s a paradox I can’t see a way out of yet, though I wouldn’t mind foregoing the emissions, the security lines, and the fees.
As for his first trip, we did, in fact, manage to rearrange our luggage, and checked our bag for free. We even successfully navigated airport security with a cooler full of milk. On the flight itself, everything went as smooth as could be. The boy slept the whole way through.
So darned good. Please never stop writing.