He Doesn't Care About Us

Heading out to the airport to pick up the wife.  She’s back from a trip overseas.  A bright Sunday afternoon.  The cold is beginning to affect the light so that things look metallic.  Every day, the sun’s making its way down earlier. 

I had just finished teaching an early education English class.  Only one student showed and we dove into Aesop’s Fables.  ‘The Mouse and the Lion”  “The Vain Jackdaw.”  This young girl recognized a number of the tales.  She confirmed that she’d read them in Chinese.  Certainly there is no shortage of Aesop translations.  But could it be that the stories are older and more elemental than any modern translation?  Which was the first culture to tell the Mouse and the Lion fable?  Did it start west and make its way east or was it the other way around?

I got the text message that my wife had landed.  I know that precise moment in the journey.  They’ll be an hour’s worth of queuing and schlepping before she emerges.  I grab the girls and we head over in the car. We’re most of the way there when we get an updated text:  “I’m on the train to the luggage area.”  We’re going to be early.  Fortunately, perhaps, there is a ton of traffic at the ramp up to the Terminal Three arrival maw. 

Park the car in the outer ring between number 10 and number 12.  The guy in the car ahead us is smoking by the curb.  I roll up behind him.  My daughters, the welcoming committee, have already fallen asleep.  I start to read the book I’ve brought, a brief history Nicaragua.  Eight pages later cars approach and take off, but no one is concerned that we’re just sitting here.  In a U.S. airport I’d have been told to ‘move-on’ by now.  But here the touch of airport traffic regulation is much more faint. Eventually someone would certainly have something to say.  There is a cop walking up and down.  But he doesn’t care about us. 

The latest text arrives:  “I’m through customs, where are you?”