Miami airport is strange, that can be confirmed, especially when you are wandering semiaimlessly for 5 hours with 45 pounds of technology and magazines on your back.
Flying in, the delicate breakwater islands and the skyscrapers, i wanted to live here, maybe. There'd certainly be work in interpretation or teaching or whatever. It's overcast and humid and about 90 degrees and I know there's no respite of winter, but the red roofs are uniform, the buildings are low, football fields are frequent. There's something poetic about living on a land so flat and so close to the sea. So close to drownding. The city is filled with huge puddles, most desguised as golf corses. Hide the sinkholes with sand traps. The square blocks of water might be shrimp ponds.
Inside the airport, I realize that this place was shocking when I we got back last time because it is a shock. People coordinate thier movements in ways that you'd never see elsewhere- 45 boyscouts all searching the leg-pockets of thier cargo pants as their leader commands them. two old men, four adult sons and one little boy all wearing matcihng "white guy on vacation" shirts, printed with blue leaves. Did all the wives stay home? Were they banned because they wanted to wear non-matching capri pants? A family of five each pushes a luggage cart in perfect synchrony, identicle bad posture and hung heads.
Types of transport I've seen:
Cops of bikes, segways, feet. Carts ranging from single perosn golf carts to mini buses. Endless umbrella strollers. A woman in a wheelchair with two children on her lap.
People look at me bad in the airport bathroom when I scrub my neck with paper towels (packed the soap) and wash out my toothpaste with warm automatic facuet water. What? Can't a girl take an acidopholous pill at a waterfountain without getting flack about it? You're the one who's plucking your eyebrows and leaving the extra hairs all over the edge of the sink- what is this, my co-op house?
There's lots of iterations in the airport. It's shaped like a giant U but badly explained, so I ended up out of security immeditely and outside more than once. There's so many men in construction vests, so many help-staff in absolutely hideous shirts. It's seriously the ugliest shirt design I have ever seen. They must look tacky on purpose. At every check-in station there are workers in black jumpsuits with neon green patches, vigeriously spinning baggage on these steel lazy-susan like aparatuses and wrapping them in the same bright color of plastic wrap. It makes sense, its a useful thing to do to an overstuffed or flimsy bag, but their work is so rapid and repetitive that it looks like that of manufacture rather than maintinece and prevention. Chuck Klosterman sees the airport, especially international airports as huge working bodies. Acutally, he sees them as purgatory, but I see them as cells. These wrappers of TrueStar SecureBag perform some important function. They are the rhizozomes, producing goldgibodies. Maybe they are some organ that makes the cellulose to keep the cell wall strong and with its gifts for the folks unstolen. As soon as the bags are coated they are thrown on the conveyor belt, into the nucleus.
I forgot to call my grandparents before I left, earning major bad family karma. I left my cell phone at home because I only would use it to make this call. I'm bouncing back and forth between businesses to get quarters for the pay phone. Hudson news lady tells me to buy something. I find nothing under 2$ which is a real monopoly they have, let me tell you. My great grandma would creak out in russian tones "Zhey take advantaj!" So I go to starbucks, coffee is 2.30, the barrista tells me they have a change machine. I wander around, doing that drunk-esque walk where you just slam from one foot to the other turning rapidly. I go to the infromation desk, a lady who I thought was maybe African but she speaks in spanish to a janitor. I ask if there's a change machine, there isn't, I explain the situation. I go back to Hudson news, store of dissatisfaction. I put my backpack on her desk to check for quarters.
"I let you use my phone."
"What? No, I can't do that. I don't want to abuse your job"
"Not my job, not thier phone. Just use my phone"
"Are you sure? You shouldn't do this if you don't want to"
She picks up this early model black berry in one of those bulky plastic and fabric cases and slides it down the counter. I pull out my pink notecard: US Phone #s. Call G&G. As I punch in the 513 area code, the phone pulls up lots of names that start with Fe....but my grandparents aren't in her contacts.
No answer. "It's still early in texas."
"Do you want to try again?"
"No, I'll wait a while. Thank you so much."
"When I'm in texas, you let me use your phone."
"Of course. Thank you"
"I'll be here until 3 if you want to come back."
"Thank you"
I walk towards my terminal (still unsure if its J or H), no longer doing that zig-zag scissors walk. Now I'm a drunk reformed, back straigt under weight, feet forward. I might just be faking it until I get out of her motherly gaze, but I really do want to make her proud. I'm glad my grandma didn't answer- to slip her the $1 I would have for using her minutes would have been tacky and destroyed my interaction with the culture, my participant observation in how this supercell works.
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