This spring, I'm charged with returning to one of my favorite cities on the planet -- New Orleans. I'm going to down the muffaletas, sip some chicory coffee, and waltz around the streets with a hurricane in hand for the entirety of my stay. The only problem? To get there, I'll be skipping the monotonous drive through southern Mississippi's wall-eyed I-10 corridor and flying straight into Louis B. Armstrong airport for a wedding. Did I mention I'll be locked in a plane for 4 1/2 hours. With a toddler. During nap time. Also, there will be an hour and a half layover in that cesspool of domestic air travel, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, ATL.
Now I've seen some things in my day. Frail hookers lined the streets of my commute through southeast DC. I had to interview people inches away from a hefty pool of blood after a Georgia shootout in the projects. When I was 8, a woman whose brain was leaking out of her head was carted past me in a Central Florida ER. All told, these are not nice things to encounter in one's life. But flying with a toddler 25,000 feet off the ground in a steel bullet of strangers and weird air pressure? Whoa-ho-ho. We're in a whole new territory here.
This is not to say I'm scared of some crash-and-burn flight. I've been a regular flier since I first boarded an airplane to New York City at 17. Every flight I've had has been similar -- thunderous engines, stale air, those damn carts the stewardesses roll over your toes when they're trying to serve your neighbor a third of a Coke. I don't love flying. It's a necessary evil, and I don't view it as any different than a Greyhound bus ride, only on a plane you're looking at clouds instead of crack pipes and discarded McDonald's bags.
I know, I know -- flying is supposed to be of a different ilk. My mother-in-law likes to remind me and everyone within earshot about the days of aviation's golden years, when one actually cared about decorum and dressed in something other than a velour track suit and flip-flops. Back then flying was expensive and glamorous. I'm sure it was also a lot more pleasant, those years before passengers had to be corralled through a litany of checkpoints, baring callouses and corns at one station and having their saucy bits unloaded at others. In these modern, anything-goes times, I'm a bit freaked out about taking a baby through all of that. And exposing him to the inevitable pair of Tasmanian Devil print pajamas my seatmate will be donning.
Of course, I get what's really going on in el brain-o. This isn't about traveling with a kid, per se. Rather, it's the prospect of looking like an absolute dolt in front of hundreds, perhaps thousands of strangers. Scratch that. It's looking like an absolute dolt of a parent in front of all these strangers. And being unable to control the situation. I can't call off pat-downs, drag a gallon of milk on board, or avoid checking a carseat. I can't blast the child's favorite records and distract him with the prospect of going to a park or seeing a truck. Instead, I'll have to just sit there and take it. And while I would like to tell myself that I don't care what 250 glaring passengers are thinking, in truth, I don't want to come off as a class-A moron. I don't want to turn beet red, and offer excuses, and worst of all, put my kid in a situation where he is the focus of strangers' hatred.
To try to cope with this new-found fear, I've entered a healthy stage therapists like to call denial. As in, I have yet to buy my plane tickets. As in, I've Google-mapped a trip from Chapel Hill to New Orleans at least 10 times, hoping the drive will go from 15 hours to five. As in I keep imagining I will magically land in New Orleans with kid, unscathed, well-rested, and ready for king cake and a pot of gumbo! As petty as it sounds, this denial thing has also led me to think about all of the other challenges I'd rather encounter to avoid this one. Bring on the skydiving. Whip out the snakes and scorpions and spiders. Throw me in a friggin closet with one of those hoarder people's 30-plus years of shit. I'll be cool! These are escapable horrors! Trapped in a steel bullet with cranky strangers and bitchy flight attendants and a screaming bambino? Lord, take me now.
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