Killing Time at ORD

/ Jeff Cann

I’m feeling lost and forlorn like this dropped luggage Susan spotted in the middle of the tarmac

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.  

~ ~ ~

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 form 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 an 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.

29 thoughts on “Killing Time at ORD”

  1. Hoping you are flying soon! I continue to be impressed by your transition away from caffeine. It shill gives me shivers to imagine, but I can at least imagine it possible now : )

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    • We’re home 🙂 The hardest part of giving up caffeine has been finding things to drink without caffeine. The hotel the other morning didn’t have decaf coffee. I get it, who wakes up and grabs a decaf except for me, but still, seems like such an easy thing to offer.

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      • Lol, yes! When I did big-hall catering gigs in college, I learned that most establishments ONLY serve decaf coffee, to avoid risk of lawsuit, etc. We would go around and take everybody’s order and then verify when we served it, but it was all decaf. : )

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        • HaHa, that’s hilarious. I wonder how many times I got placebo-effected at functions when I thought I was knocking back two or three cups of coffee to wake up for the drive home.

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  2. This has only happened to me once and thankfully it was the last leg (Bali to Sydney) and the airline housed and fed us for the 12-hour delay. Jonesing…not a word I’ve heard before, but now added to the dictionary.

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  3. Jeff, I haven’t logged into this site in years but I’ve thought about it many times and always in correlation to your posts. Today I had to just to tell you I loved this one. I know it’s mostly about the traveling aspect but it made me cry reading about you settling Sophie into her apartment. I hope she loves it there.

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    • This is such a sweet comment. Having her settle into her professional life is bittersweet. We’re so proud of her but, sigh, she’s half a continent away. Thank you for commenting. I’ve missed you.

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  5. I do hope Sophie is happy in her new place. I hope you’re back in yours’!
    ~
    I am taking long service leave in August (the whole month off) but this post has convinced me to drive, even if it’s over two thousand miles, not fly.

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    • You were in my hometown, the hotel could even have been within spittin’ distance. It occurs to me we’re not really friends—I wouldn’t have known you if you were in my Starbucks! I would love to have seen you and Susan tho. I’m amazed that you got on a plane! Your account is exactly why I dont travel. I’m afraid there’d be no diet ginger ale.

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      • We’re friends. I even thought for a minute I should contact you. But all we did outside of the airport is sleep. I was skeptical all day about actually flying. We even had some shenanigans today about briefly losing our reservations. The whole system is pretty screwed up.

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    • Well, Sophie and Susan were pretty upbeat about their drive after they got over the initial tiredness. Might be a good strategy. Flying seems to have gotten harder since it did it last three years ago. We used to be able to go up to a ticket agent to get help. Not this time. Everything was phone support. Hour-long phone support.

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  7. I hope you and Susan made it home safely. I love the story of your adventure … helping Sophie get settled in her new life. Maybe this is the impetus you need to move west. Btw, you really captured the ORD experience. I spent many late nights and early mornings there, coming and going on biz when I was a consultant. Tom and I lived in Mount Prospect, just minutes away. Take care and keep writing about this latest chapter with Sophie … while she creates her own path!

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    • While we got a pretty good feel for O’Hare, we really didn’t interact with Chicago at all (which we knew was a huge oversite). I haven’t visited there in decades, but I rarely vacation in large cities. I’m much more of a rural guy. Missoula was simply wonderful. Susan and I immediately wanted to live there. Although Sophie had a couple of conversations of people wary of her moving there until she said she was starting a job in forestry. Seems to be a lot of distrust and animosity towards those moving to Montana from the east and west coasts.

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  8. I love-hate the in limbo feeling. Love because it allows me freedom from any responsibility (not my fault! I can’t help it!) while I wander aimlessly in airports and people-guilt free, but hate because it simply delays the inevitable return to reality.
    Hope you made it! And what a bittersweet reason to be out there to begin with. That feeling of my parents leaving after helping me scrape some furniture together…it felt so empty and sad despite knowing it was the beginning of something exciting. I remember that strange sense of quiet very well.

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    • Because I just moved back to the DC area when I graduated from college, I never really got that feeling of being fresh and alone. It really makes me proud that she has the confidence to step out of her known world like this. I’m a pretty anxious flier. Chilling in a airport is just a reminder that eventually, I need to get on a plane. I like to get all over with quickly. Oh so happy to be home.

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  9. congrats to your daughter on her graduation and new life journey! montana is beautiful … nothing like big blue sky, fresh air, and mountains!

    and, congrats on finally getting home! … why is air travel so very frightening and difficult these days? that piece of luggage said “nope, not getting on!”

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  10. I’d say you had quite the adventure but airports aren’t exactly choice locations to exlpore, lol. I worked the screening machines pre- 9/11 when I was much younger at Lambert International. On occasion I worked double shifts and would see stranded travellers settling in the airport either because of delays, petty airlines, or convenience. Wild times.

    Jonesing is a word my bestie uses all the time in regards to cravings he knows he shouldn’t indulge in. I crack up every time and tease him. Also reminds me of that old song Love Jones by the Brighter Side of Darkness. Old R&B when singers would address the listener before actually singing the song (or hook) 😆. Glad you made it home safely. Welcome back! Lol

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