On O’Hare Airport And The Kindness Of Strangers
This is a story about something we hear too little about these days: the goodness of our fellow countrymen.
Last week at this time, I was on my way to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to catch a flight to Italy to guide a retreat there. My husband dropped me off at the terminal and went to park our car in one of O’Hare’s massive parking lots.
At the check-in counter, I realized I had left my cell phone in the car. When my husband joined me, I asked him to go back for the phone. Can we even remember a time when we still could survive without our cell phones?
Luckily, I had arrived at the airport three hours ahead of time so I wasn’t concerned that my husband’s trip to the car and back would make me late for the flight.
When he didn’t return after a half hour, I began to think he might be having trouble remembering where he parked the car. It’s one of the fears that crops up frequently in my anxiety dreams.
When he didn’t come back after an hour, I began to worry. After an hour and a half, my worry turned to panic. Did he fall and injure himself, and that’s why he hadn’t come back? Did he have a heart attack? How would I know? Without my cell phone I couldn’t call him.
I approached a United Airlines check-in agent, explained my situation, and asked if I could use her phone to call my husband. She quickly agreed, but then my husband didn’t answer. Another 20 minutes went by.
By now it was getting close to the time I had to get to my gate and the line for the security check-in — which consisted of just a few people when I arrived — now had several dozen people waiting with just one agent instead of the usual two or three checking boarding passes and IDs. It was taking eveyone even longer than usual time to get through the security line.
I went back to the United agent and asked if I might try sending a text to my husband asking him to call me immediately. This time he called back. He said he was having trouble locating the car in the parking garage. I suggested he try the using the car key alarm, but that didn’t work.
By this time, I was pretty convinced I’d be going to Italy without my phone and began imagining all sorts of scenarios. How would I be able to keep in touch with my husband? How would I let my Italian friends who were picking me up know I’d arrived?
I finally got through the excruciatingly long security line as the clock ticked closer to my flight’s boarding time. Security was just outside Gate B1. My flight’s gate was B16 — clear on the other side of the concourse. When I finally arrived to the gate huffing and puffing with my heavy shoulder bag, I asked a young woman ahead of me in the boarding line if I could borrow her cell phone to again call my husband.
She gladly handed me her phone. The people around me offered suggestions of how my husband might get the phone to me if he ever managed to find the car and get back inside the airport. Maybe he ask a United agent to bring it to me, they suggested.
The young woman whose cell phone I borrowed asked me my name and offered to tell the gate agent I was on my way in case I had to go back through security to get the phone from my husband and was running late to board.
My husband, in the meantime, had found a parking garage employee who was kind enough to drive him up and down the garage levels until he located our car. But then he had to get back to the airport. There was also the question of how he was going to get to me through security without a boarding pass, or if I would have time to go from my gate back to security to get the phone from him.
So with my shoulder bag streaming behind me, I raced back to Gate B1 from B16 and the security entrance. I could see my husband on the other side of the security machines explaining our situation to a TSA agent. Luckily the agent was an understanding man and let my husband put the cell phone in a bin so it could go through the baggage screening machine where I could retrieve it on the other side. By now it was just 10 minutes to the end of boarding time for my flight.
I was reminded of those scenes in films where the guy in love with the girl arrives at the airport just before her plane is to take off and in time to tell her he loves her. In this scene, I couldn’t hug or kiss my husband goodbye because of the security glass and screening machines between us, but we could at least throw each other kisses and call to each other, “I love you.”
When I finally got back to Gate B16 brandishing my phone, the people still in line applauded and patted me on the back. My little drama had made us into a team.
I suppose it’s not hard to feel yourself in communion with others with whom you are about to enter a metal cannister and fly across an ocean at 35,000 feet in the air. But it felt good nonetheless to experience such a sense of comradery.
Last week, the Republican National Committee released a video responding to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running again for president. It tries to convince us that we are living in a country over-run by criminals, drug addicts and undocumented immigrants. Never mind that the images used in the video aren’t even real. They were cooked up by artificial intelligence.
In real life — the life I and so many of us experience daily — nothing could be further from the truth. Our go-to instinct is still kindness — this despite the cynical efforts of those grasping for power who want us to believe otherwise. There are good Samaritans all around us willing to lend a hand to a stranger on the road. I am grateful for them.
How might we reach out this week to a stranger with kindness? How might we emulate “the good Samaritan.”
