Chicago O'Hare

If they didn't want me to leave home, why did they give me luggage (Samsonite, hard-sided, no wheels) when I graduated from high school?
The restrooms in Chicago O'Hare give me the weirdest deja vu experience. The floor to ceiling stainless steel stalls and the weird little rotating plastic sheath over the toilet seat remind me of the 18 year old me. I remember being very tired. Probably from carrying my own weight in carry-on luggage and from not having slept the night before due to excitement. I certainly wasn't travel weary since the flight to Chicago was less than an hour. Those toilet stalls say so much about the kid I was. One who came from a family of people who's bottoms never touched public toilet seats. One who was taught that the world away from home was absolutely crawling from one end to the other with thieves and perverts. Those stalls were little cubes of midwestern heaven. Safe, sanitary and private. I think I might have hung out there had I not been too concerned about the huge distance still seperating me and my departure gate. It was years and years before I appreciated the fact that my mom had let the plane carrying me leave the ground without throwing herself in front of it. I can conjure up a very plausible image of her being physically restrained by my step-dad, of her escaping his grasp and sprinting on her determined little mom-legs ahead of baffled airport security onto the tarmac. Sometimes I think this might have actually happened only they decided not to tell me.

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