TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I spend a lot of time in airports. It can be a stressful place, packed with people who are overloaded with adrenaline and cortisol, subsisting on thirty-dollar bags of almonds and seven-dollar bottles of water. People are rushing to make their flights, or frantically finding their way to their terminal, or struggling to get rebooked. I’m often one of them.

When I’m preparing for a multi-city book tour, I’m not nervous about reading in front of people or answering questions or finding my way around a strange place. I’m nervous about getting where I’m going. And with somewhat regular government shutdowns impacting TSA these days, those nerves aren’t coming from nowhere!

But there are so many beautiful moments in airports, if you pay attention: parents comforting children, or occupying them with silly games; couples excited to be going on a trip together; teams of uniformed student athletes traveling to, or from, a big game.

Outside the terminal, you might see people hugging hello or goodbye, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. Parents and grandparents picking up kids and swinging them around. Couples reunited, kissing and hugging right there in the pickup lane, with drivers maneuvering around them. After a long day of travel, it warms my heart. And it reminds me that people — and a dog! — are waiting for me at home.

Travel is difficult, and it’s a privilege. It takes us on adventures beyond what we’ve known, brings us back to a land where we have roots, and reunites faraway family.

Today’s poem finds communion in the airport, seeing the space as a symbol of what binds us.

at the baggage claim in JFK
by Lo Naylor

a man in a black newsboy cap holds a sign with one word:
mother. other men hold signs but I see mother
& cannot look away. it’s late,
faces are clenched & the carousels buzz
nervously as if they too are awaiting her. I’m not
holding a sign, but I glance around to see if
my mother might appear anyway, around the corner,
draped in totes & purses, wheeling her suitcase
with a fraying green ribbon tied to the handle. 
my child is strapped to me, sleeping, & I imagine
my mother, a cushion the shape of a croissant 
around her neck, lighting upon the man’s sign
as if it were the face of her daughter, the one she lost,
returned to her. a sign. a siren. mother.
someone asks & I overhear the man say
he hasn’t seen his mother in twenty-three years.
he would have been a small child, now he’s tall,
bearded, & he runs to her, a small woman
with long braided hair. for a moment
we are all suspended—the whole airport:
the passengers, the conveyor belts, the escalators
going neither up nor down. then a sheen reappears
on the floors as the man drops to his knees, 
wraps his arms around his mother’s waist,
draws himself into the child
who might have hidden behind her legs.
it doesn’t last, of course. the baby makes her noises
& time clicks back into place, ferries us all away.

“at the baggage claim at JFK” by Lo Naylor. Used by permission of the poet.