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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 15, 2002
She watches as I fumble through my US Airways envelope.
This is my flight information. No, this is my flight information.
I had not fully mastered e-tickets when air travel became dangerous. I canceled a trip in mid-September.
Now I stand here with two rowdy children and a mess of printouts as a confused-looking woman judges if I am dangerous.
This is my driver's license. This was my daughter's ticket.
This is my get-over-it trip. Until last weekend, I knew only second-hand about things like the National Guard in airports, having to take your sneakers off, not being allowed to use the restroom over Salt Lake City.
Two days later, I've felt the palpable tension of bossy, unsmiling airline workers. I've made the inappropriate kitchen-table jokes.
"Terrorist? Shmerrorist. Try flying with my children!"
I put this off as long as I could. "I'm not taking my kids on an airplane," I said, again and again until it became unhealthy.
Score one, Osama.
I had a new nephew Up North, and a grandmother in her 90s. My 5-year-old son had never seen snow.
The travel-day chatter confirms it's time.
"Will the plane hit a building?" my son asks.
"Will it hang out the window of the building?" my daughter wants to know.
"Can a policeman bring a gun onto the plane? What if a bad person stole a policeman's clothes?"
Their questions match their personalities to a tee.
My anxious son frets that our plane is too high or moving too fast. My detective daughter thinks up endless acts of subterfuge to elude the security workers, who keep engaging in how-do-I-do-this discussions as they examine our belongings.
Maybe I am unnaturally consumed with Sept. 11.
But it's not like you have to look for it.
My brother lost a neighbor in the World Trade Center. They show me his house, with a large American flag on the mailbox.
A house on the same block has a projection image of Old Glory, much like you see in elaborate Christmas displays.
A woman in my sister-in-law's book club lost her husband. Their children are all in a crafts club together. Last week they made Valentines, and the youngest wished he could give one to his dad.
At bedtime, my grandmother asks if I had ever seen the World Trade Center.
No, I never did.
"So tall. So grand," she says. Her employer moved into the center after she had retired. She used to go there to check on benefits and visit former co-workers.
My brother-in-law witnessed the tower collapse from his Manhattan office. An Orthodox Jew, he wears a yarmulke crocheted with American flags.
My parents have a flag on their lawn. All their neighbors do too. It wasn't like that when I lived there. Maybe Northeasterners do the same thing when they visit Florida. "Look at all the flags," they say.
The remembrances are like a blanket laid over the regular business of going home -- the gossip and dysfunction, the sibling feuds and lost jobs. Like the extra stuff in your suitcase, they don't quite want to fit.
It's Sunday. I'm holding my 2-month-old nephew. He was born in the aftermath, his mother pregnant when it happened. Losing neighbors.
Flipping channels on their jumbo-screen television, I catch an interview with Chilean author Isabel Allende. It's an international women's audience. Their politics skew to the left.
Allende takes a question from a Pakistani woman -- a speech, actually. The woman rants about global militarism, about the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the assault on Islam in the name of women's rights, Israel's unchecked aggression.
"Excuse me!" I want to shout, incredulous at this viewpoint. "Have you, like, been sleeping these past six months?"
But the baby is hungry. And it occurs to me, just then, that it's time to let it go.
Not forget. Certainly not forgive. Just treat this whole business like the other risks we face in our lives. Like cancer, like drugs, like sending your children into a public restroom, or watching them cross the street. Absorb it into the greater stew.
Get used to the sneaker check.
Our flight to Tampa is two hours late. The pilot blames a mechanical problem. It rains. They move our gate. We're 10th in line on the runway.
But my children have popcorn and crayons to occupy them.
My daughter draws an American flag.