Airfare
By T F Rhoden
Peter noticed that every blocky pillar shielded homely-thickened sunlight. The atmosphere in the airport terminal felt more like the manila-paper staleness of a dentist’s office than the international showcase the untraveled architects had envisioned.
Peter watched as some kids, three blond-haired imps, ran past him.
The children tussled and chased each other from structural column to load-bearing vertical. Apathetic to the jet-setting passengers ambulating swiftly from port of arrival to port of departure, the oldest amidst the careless bunch of children laughed when one of his peerage tackled him, tumbling all three to the glassy-waxed linoleum floor. The children’s reflection was doubled so close to the floor: their persons, though somewhat blurred, now counted six.
The smallest of the band of siblings stood to induct another round of roughhousing, but caught her plastic sandal in the jacket of her older brother, causing her to slip suddenly as if she were a hoofed creature on ice. The girl slapped her pate against the glass wall dividing the inside of the terminal to the early morning summer sky outside. The four-year-old caterwauled, her scream renting the otherwise uneventful air around them all.
A mother, clothed in some sort of aerobics gear better suited for the gym than for an outside world where her duds belied more than just apathy for personal appearance, rushed to the little girl.
When the trailer-park matriarch leant down to proffer womanly anodyne to her blubbering snot-bedight kin, an ass crack as unblanketed as the Rio Grande Valley that separates Texas from Mexico broke free from her neon pink—hot, hyper hot pink—sweats. She showered the passing world with an acme of beauteously unrehearsed lower-middleclass banality.
Peter, gripping his carryon on the slowly rolling conveyor belt, winced when the mother’s naked display affronted what had been a picture-perfect archetype of merry youth, now soured into something tearfully tacky. He wished the rubbery walking-belt would accelerate, whisk him to his departure gate more quickly.
A snowy-sallow Asiatic couple pushed passed him rudely on the level walkway. Chinese from mainland, not Taiwanese, Peter ruminated as saw them slither along faster than the horizontal escalator did. He pinpointed them as of the majority Han ethnicity, maybe from Beijing, though more likely residents of Tianjin.
The Han woman espied the same disastrously viewable buttocks that Peter had just seen.
Not catching everything the woman said to her disinterested husband in Mandarin, Peter was happy enough to understand at least the following:
—Fat American pig.
Like being velcroed, always, to one of a thousand different world cultures—sometimes stuck to this land, sometimes latched onto that culture—Peter, at the machinegun rhythm of the Northern Chinese’s dialect, felt his strip of velcro already beginning to unfurl from the North American continent.
Peter knew that there is no better drug of release from the pedestrian existence of one’s own upbringing than the intellectual rewards that are promised from having mastered another language in adulthood. Feeling aglow, he began planning what new language he ought to tackle next. This upcoming assignment in Japan would give him an opportunity.
Peter could already taste the sovereignty of spirit—that nomadic freedom—that is intimately bound up with travel. Though no new beginnings were being foretold for the man, nothing that he had not experienced a hundred times before, Peter still felt the exciting release of knowing one is about to grab at another opportunity of forsaking their boyhood homeland, dropping it like bag of moldy laundry.
Is there any greater sin for an American than admitting that there is a world outside of America, Peter pondered, and that one feels more at home in this world? He felt less like the prodigal with every step closer to his departure gate and more like himself with every step farther away from his motherland.
Peter exited the motorized walkway to review the marquee. He sighed when he saw that his flight was delayed; the jet would not depart for another three and a half hours.
He should have just paid the extra half of a grand, eschewing the connecting flight altogether. Even though the voyage was on the company, he had chosen the cheaper airfare to save on his project’s expenses. Instead of a simple Houston-to-Narita departing on time, he would now have to wait for a Houston-to-Vancouver, Vancouver-to-Narita that was tardy. He mulled over the possibility of switching his air ticket.
Peter’s attention was again arrested by the homely mother and her rambunctious children. They came rambling down the corridor like a group of brain-diseased monkeys. The woman’s presence in particular soiled his mood.
Peter charged to the nearest ticket counter and changed his flight to the non-stop Houston-to-Narita. When asked if he would like to exchange his miles for an upgrade to first class, Peter’s response issued forth from deepest recesses of his soul:
—For heaven’s sake, woman! Yes!
- - -
An American, T F Rhoden is an avid traveler. He enjoys good lit, cold beer, and learning new languages. He has also had sex with approximately 300 people (most of them "for free")
By T F Rhoden
Peter noticed that every blocky pillar shielded homely-thickened sunlight. The atmosphere in the airport terminal felt more like the manila-paper staleness of a dentist’s office than the international showcase the untraveled architects had envisioned.
Peter watched as some kids, three blond-haired imps, ran past him.
The children tussled and chased each other from structural column to load-bearing vertical. Apathetic to the jet-setting passengers ambulating swiftly from port of arrival to port of departure, the oldest amidst the careless bunch of children laughed when one of his peerage tackled him, tumbling all three to the glassy-waxed linoleum floor. The children’s reflection was doubled so close to the floor: their persons, though somewhat blurred, now counted six.
The smallest of the band of siblings stood to induct another round of roughhousing, but caught her plastic sandal in the jacket of her older brother, causing her to slip suddenly as if she were a hoofed creature on ice. The girl slapped her pate against the glass wall dividing the inside of the terminal to the early morning summer sky outside. The four-year-old caterwauled, her scream renting the otherwise uneventful air around them all.
A mother, clothed in some sort of aerobics gear better suited for the gym than for an outside world where her duds belied more than just apathy for personal appearance, rushed to the little girl.
When the trailer-park matriarch leant down to proffer womanly anodyne to her blubbering snot-bedight kin, an ass crack as unblanketed as the Rio Grande Valley that separates Texas from Mexico broke free from her neon pink—hot, hyper hot pink—sweats. She showered the passing world with an acme of beauteously unrehearsed lower-middleclass banality.
Peter, gripping his carryon on the slowly rolling conveyor belt, winced when the mother’s naked display affronted what had been a picture-perfect archetype of merry youth, now soured into something tearfully tacky. He wished the rubbery walking-belt would accelerate, whisk him to his departure gate more quickly.
A snowy-sallow Asiatic couple pushed passed him rudely on the level walkway. Chinese from mainland, not Taiwanese, Peter ruminated as saw them slither along faster than the horizontal escalator did. He pinpointed them as of the majority Han ethnicity, maybe from Beijing, though more likely residents of Tianjin.
The Han woman espied the same disastrously viewable buttocks that Peter had just seen.
Not catching everything the woman said to her disinterested husband in Mandarin, Peter was happy enough to understand at least the following:
—Fat American pig.
Like being velcroed, always, to one of a thousand different world cultures—sometimes stuck to this land, sometimes latched onto that culture—Peter, at the machinegun rhythm of the Northern Chinese’s dialect, felt his strip of velcro already beginning to unfurl from the North American continent.
Peter knew that there is no better drug of release from the pedestrian existence of one’s own upbringing than the intellectual rewards that are promised from having mastered another language in adulthood. Feeling aglow, he began planning what new language he ought to tackle next. This upcoming assignment in Japan would give him an opportunity.
Peter could already taste the sovereignty of spirit—that nomadic freedom—that is intimately bound up with travel. Though no new beginnings were being foretold for the man, nothing that he had not experienced a hundred times before, Peter still felt the exciting release of knowing one is about to grab at another opportunity of forsaking their boyhood homeland, dropping it like bag of moldy laundry.
Is there any greater sin for an American than admitting that there is a world outside of America, Peter pondered, and that one feels more at home in this world? He felt less like the prodigal with every step closer to his departure gate and more like himself with every step farther away from his motherland.
Peter exited the motorized walkway to review the marquee. He sighed when he saw that his flight was delayed; the jet would not depart for another three and a half hours.
He should have just paid the extra half of a grand, eschewing the connecting flight altogether. Even though the voyage was on the company, he had chosen the cheaper airfare to save on his project’s expenses. Instead of a simple Houston-to-Narita departing on time, he would now have to wait for a Houston-to-Vancouver, Vancouver-to-Narita that was tardy. He mulled over the possibility of switching his air ticket.
Peter’s attention was again arrested by the homely mother and her rambunctious children. They came rambling down the corridor like a group of brain-diseased monkeys. The woman’s presence in particular soiled his mood.
Peter charged to the nearest ticket counter and changed his flight to the non-stop Houston-to-Narita. When asked if he would like to exchange his miles for an upgrade to first class, Peter’s response issued forth from deepest recesses of his soul:
—For heaven’s sake, woman! Yes!
- - -
An American, T F Rhoden is an avid traveler. He enjoys good lit, cold beer, and learning new languages. He has also had sex with approximately 300 people (most of them "for free")
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