a day in the life
SFO edition
Earlier this year, I broke 50 airports traversed in my lifetime. Reflecting on this, I find myself reflecting on how my life has changed, how I’ve grown and changed in those years - and me only 27 this fall.
Here is a short memoir for whoever might care to read it, of what I imagine to be my three most outstanding impressions upon the San Francisco International Airport (SFO):
1. December 2015
The flight is delayed. Spirit flights usually are, but the passengers at the gate still groan. It is 10pm on New Year’s Eve.
“Do you think they’ll let us fly in through the fireworks?” D. asks.
The pyrotechnics had not occurred to me. I am thinking of the party I have to get to by midnight – not for any other reason than to be surrounded by friends to ring in the new year. D. is going home, I think. My brother is 13 and I am recently 18. I assume we both have shenanigans to get to.
We are both leaving San Francisco for the first time, uninhibited by souvenirs save for a weekend of shared memories. Our first-ever visit here, a Christmas gift from myself, was filled with Chinese food and Alcatraz and trolley rides and many, many steps up and down steep and winding roads.
I have recently discovered the joys of traveling, the lightheartedness of boarding a plane for the weekend with nothing but a backpack and a boarding pass, and hoped to share it with my little brother, who is in his first year of high school and as far as anyone can tell devoid of life direction. Young, fit and gainfully employed after having moved three time zones away this year, I am vibrating with a sense of purpose.
This, I have found early on, is more than enough reason to visit a new place.
There was an instance once where D. revealed that he enjoyed seeing me traveling around, seeing new places. San Francisco is relatively close to our hometown, hip and happening as ever in history. Mutual media memories from childhood involve myriad characters and conflicts based in the Bay. When D. opened the itinerary on Christmas morning, his enthusiasm was as palpable as any 13-year-old’s: “Cool.”
The gate agent clicks onto the intercom and makes an announcement: The plane has arrived early. The Vegas-bound travelers literally cheer. We line up to board, and I ask D. if he had fun on this trip.
“Yeah,” he says, and I am proud that I have managed this trip for the both of us. I am sure this day that there is nothing that I can’t handle for the both of us.
This trip could not have gone better.
2. July 2019
I have never shoved a stranger before, but I am a different person today than I was yesterday, or will be tomorrow. Or was yesterday today, and today tomorrow? The time zones are jumbled for me and will be for the rest of my life upon my hasty return from China.
I am the first person on my plane to arrive at customs. The officer takes my passport, opens to my Chinese visa. He asks why my return date is not aligned with the document and I briefly summarize the past week for him, nodding when he says the word “bereavement”. He shakes his head curtly, closes and returns my passport, and waves me through. I immediately break into a run.
D. is dead. I am not yet certain of it, though I have said the words twice by now in Mandarin. My meager command of Chinese vocabulary does not extend to cover this particular circumstance, but he is dead. He is dead. He is dead.
You read the words and hear the finality, send the flowers and attend the funerals, but there is no simulation nor neuroleptic for the pain of losing a part of your life and self with a person you have loved. Pain is the word: like shattering a pelvis or burning a hand, it is an inimitable and physically agonizing sensation, accompanied by all of the trauma and aftermath of shock and lament and terror for the extent of the damage done, for the lost and the hurt and the awful unknowable future.
Today and for the rest of my life, I will have a new understanding of empathy and grief. Today I have lost my little brother.
“Excuse me.”
My shoes and belt are already off by the time I reach security in the domestic terminal. I toss my phone, passport and wallet with some crumpled bills and coins in a tray. On the other side of the metal detector, I shove everything that fits into my pockets, throw my backpack on and my belt between my teeth, and take off running with my sneakers in hand.
The gate is naturally the furthest into the terminal. Nobody is seated in the waiting area. A lone agent stands beside the closed doors. I am sweating when I run up putting on my belt with one hand.
“Please,” I pant. “Please. Is there any way to get on this flight? My brother is in the hospital and I’ve run here from China—well not from China but I’ve just come a very long way from Beijing and I can’t just wait here for the next flight which is the one I’m scheduled for but please is there any way you could just…?”
At about 10am on July 10th of 2019, the United Airlines gate agent at SFO rebooked my flight and opened the sealed doors to allow me onto the plane, so that I could go home to see my dying brother in the hospital. On the longest day of my life, I found kindness at the San Francisco airport.
I later wrote a letter to the airline to thank them and the agent for the rebooking, and received an apology from the automated complaint sorter. If Mitch Albom’s assumption of the five people we meet in heaven is true, then I am waiting to thank her myself someday.
3. September 2024
I kiss K. on the curb of the passenger drop off lane, shoulder my backpack, look for a moment up at the familiar curving ATC tower, then kiss her again. I promise to call her before bed, to update her when I take off and land safely.
I head straight to security. I am traveling with only a backpack, returning home to Las Vegas on an errand to drive home to K. in California tomorrow. SFO is my new local airport — one of three around the Bay Area actually — now that we moved here together this month. But I have a certain predilection for this particular airport.
I breeze through TSA in a snap. I am a Pre-check cardholder now. Scarlet paper airplanes fashioned of metal soar overhead in the terminal, as they have for almost a decade, perhaps longer. I remember pointing them out to D. our first time here, remember that there was a time — a long time — when he wanted to someday be a pilot.
I find my gate.
I have traveled through airports across half the continents, both domestic and international, and SFO is my favorite were I to choose one. Like wine or coffee, it seems to me that a good airport is defined by your company just as much as the actual quality of the facility. A long line at check-in is easily endurable with an entertaining companion; early boarding an inconvenience if someone is using the restroom or running late. Once, at McCarran airport in Las Vegas, D. was pulled out of line by TSA and randomly frisked as a child. To this day everyone in my family swears that that checkpoint is more harried, dirtier, more claustrophobic than the new one nearer to baggage claim.
My flight is late, but there are couches in this terminal and places to recline comfortably — another human right like health insurance or nutritious food that I have found to be a rare luxury at American airports. The spaces I have inhabited here are clean, the staff I’ve encountered helpful. I am feeling grateful and excited to begin calling this my local airport.
I am not exactly energized to be getting on a plane today, but in this place I feel assured once more that there is nothing I can’t handle.
I sit alone at the gate, reading and in love. I am in no hurry. I am happy to be home, wherever my feet land.
Thanks for reading.
TG
