Ein li koach (part two)

I wake up at 6:30 on Friday morning to pack. My flight is at 10:15. I plan to leave my apartment at 8:00, but take forever trying to cram all of stuff into bags that can’t really fit so much stuff. So when I get into a cab at 8:50, I need nothing short of a miracle—i.e., no traffic on the highways—to make my flight.

In less than half an hour, I can already see airplanes overhead—we’re at O’Hare in record time! I get out the sheet of paper Travelocity sent me telling me which airline I’m flying and almost pass out from stupidity: “MDW,” it says, not “ORD.” Which means this: I’m going to the wrong airport. I’m supposed to be flying out of Midway—not O’Hare—in less than an hour. The devil’s in the details, it seems.

So we turn around and head south to the other Chicago airport, you know, the one I should have been at from the start. I’m sweating the whole way there, but there’s nothing I can do. We’re not weaving in and out of cars fast enough. Then we’re stuck behind a row of trucks. Then we hit a toll. And another toll.

At some point I realize that I only have enough money in my wallet to pay for a cab ride to one airport, not two. So before we hit the pre-Midway traffic, we stop at a Citgo to hit up the ATM—while the meter’s running, of course.

I get back into the car, get out the sheet I printed from Travelocity to check the airline I’m flying (déjà vu is pretty sweet, huh?) and direct the cabdriver to the ATA curb. It’s 9:53.

The curb-side check-in guys tell me there’s no chance I’m going to make the flight. The guy at the ATA ticket counter inside (where I go after cutting the whole line, of course) says I have no chance of making the flight. I say I can run really fast. He says my bags are overweight. I knew this. But I didn’t have a choice. I left so much stuff in Chicago to begin with (like my guitar, over-the-shoulder bag [I look like a school kid with my backpack on the D.C. Metro these days] desk chair and lawn chair, to name a few), but I just had too much stuff. I figured I would finesse my way into not paying the fee.

Since there was no time for that, I smiled and gave the ticketing agent my credit card, muttering under my breath, “You’re the first person ever to charge me for overweight bags, and I have overweight bags all the time,” to which he replied, “Huh?”

(At some point during this transaction, the cab driver came running after me. Seems I had left my cell phone in the car. Why not?)

The ticketing agent says, fine, you may make it, but your bags won’t. I say, put them on the next flight, I’ll pick them up tomorrow, and then I make something up about how me catching this flight will determine the future course of human events.

He didn’t buy it, but he gave me the ticket anyway.

With my winter coat draped over my shoulder, my backpack—filled with all the odds and ends I couldn’t fit in my suitcases—on my back and my garment bag—with three suits and a dozen shirts and pants—in my arms, I began sprinting to the gate—the gate, B24, of course, being the furthest gate in the airport from the ticket counter.

I get to the security checkpoint, put my bags on the belt, unpack my laptop, and run through the metal detector. But the security lady wasn’t ready for me. (But I didn’t beep, for Christ’s sake!) So I have to take off my shoes and empty my pockets—full of everything that didn’t fit into either of my suitcases or my backpack. I go through the metal detector—again without beeping—and collect my things. Somehow a battery has ended up in my shoe, but there was no time to fish it out.

I am out of shape, so carrying a heavy backpack and a garment bag—which now had my laptop in it since I couldn’t re-cram it into the backpack—would be tough enough while walking. Carrying all that weight and running/trudging/galloping through the terminal at as close to a dead sprint as I could muster was nearly impossible. I careened down moving walkways, zigzagged in between parents with strollers and even almost knocked over a deaf woman who couldn’t hear my cries of “excuse me.”

I finally get to the gate, huffing and puffing. (The huffing was real; the puffing was for sympathy.) But the door to the skyway/jetway/plane sleeve is locked. So I start banging on it. It’s 10:03. I am not late. In fact, after all of that, I am more than 10 minutes early. A man who looks like a security guard comes over to me and wonders why I am banging on the door. Duh. I make an excuse that I had the flu (not the bird flu) earlier this morning and didn’t even think I’d make it to the airport, but here I was, and I wanted to board the plane.

I walked down the jetway, smiling and still huffing, at 10:07, and I landed in D.C. at 12:54—having a great story but really and truly, I just didn’t have the strength.