While I was standing in line at the San Juan airport on Dec. 31, the most pressing issue on my mind was if I would be back in Hoboken in time to ring in the New Year with friends.
With my iPod blasting, my skin still warm from basking on the beach earlier that morning, I was so relaxed that even the security lines didn’t bother me.
I wasn’t thinking about the new Democratic Congress, about the president “surging” the number of troops in Iraq, or about my landlord “surging” my rent for the coming year. I was sublime.
And everyone else seemed to be in the same zone. Maybe it was because we had all easily adapted to island time during our vacations. Or maybe no one was impatiently checking their watches because they were all off and in bins, ready to go through metal detectors along with our boots, sneakers, and, in many cases, flip-flops.
Whatever it was, the tense exasperation of the security lines seemed to have melted away in the Caribbean sunshine. It’s amazing what good weather can do. It can even humanize the most hardened bureaucrats.
I softly laughed to myself as I noticed the Transportation Security Administration officers wearing shiny, brightly-colored “2007” cardboard top hats and tiaras.
It was obvious that my fellow passengers shared my outlook. All around me, people struck up conversations with actual human beings instead of resorting to the current all-American cure for frustration: picking up the cell phone and complaining to the first victim on their contact list.
Two guys in front of me wearing combat fatigues joked as they carried Playstation portable cases in addition to their duffel bags. The woman behind me gave the lady next to her an exact inventory of all the pasteles, fritters, and other Puerto Rican goodies that she had crammed in her suitcase.
A man in the line across from us recognized an ex-coworker, and they filled each other in what they had been up to for the past couple of years.
I smiled at one of the guys in fatigues as he glanced up at me, struggling to remove his steel-toed boots. And as I kicked off my sneakers and placed my Zip-Lock bag full of no-more-than-three-ounce liquid containers in the bin, I overheard the security officer say to the guy, “We will pray for you.”
As he walked through the metal detector, she turned to her co-worker and said, “They leave for Iraq tonight.”
And at that moment I couldn’t help feeling like anything I had been stressed about lately was incredibly insignificant. My biggest worry for that particular night was that I was going to have to spend the stroke of midnight alone in my car, driving back from the airport.
I guess sometimes we all need a little reality check to keep things in perspective.
And as I pulled in to my parking spot on Washington Street at exactly 12:01 a.m., I wondered what the New Year would bring for those two guys in the steel-toed boots with their Playstation Portables under their arms.
I realized how far away my reality must be from theirs. – Madeline Friedman Madeline Friedman is a Hudson Current staff writer. To comment on this essay or submit your own, e-mail current@hudsonreporter.com.