The Surly Bonds of Earth

I am a baby boomer. When I was six years-old, my parents booked a flight for themselves, my two brothers and me from our home state in the Midwest to Southern California where my aunt and uncle lived. It was also the sole residence of Mickey Mouse before he built himself that second home in Orlando. Knowing Mickey lived in the same state as my aunt and uncle made it the most intriguing destination I could imagine.   

Wild Blue Yonder, by Teece Aronin, available on 

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Flying was an event back then, and all of us were dressed up. My mother looked lovely in a dress, and my father wore a suit and tie. My brothers were in the sixties' equivalent of business casual, and I was wearing a brown and white striped seersucker dress with a pair of Mary Janes. My parents bought me a pink plush wind-up elephant to take on the flight, and its trunk rotated along to the tune of Frere Jacques. 

Our meals were real food, meat and potatoes and vegetables, and the flight attendant (or stewardess, in those days) gave my brothers each a junior pilot pin. I can't remember what little token of the flight she gave me, probably a junior stewardess pin.  When my father jokingly asked the flight attendant where his pin was, she made a big fuss over applying a junior pilot pin to his lapel. She was blonde, beautiful and spoke with a lovely accent. She reminded me of Inger Stevens.

Last week, I took my daughter, Sydney to the airport so she could fly out to visit her dad and we were abruptly notified at the ticket counter that her flight had been cancelled. The reason given had something to do with bad weather near Baltimore, but I've been told that airlines sometimes do that when a flight isn't full. 

Whatever the reason, we headed home for the night. I was just grateful they could book her on the same flight out of the same airport the next day. For a while, because of computer problems, they were insisting I'd have to take her to one of the busier hubs, the kind  patterned on that hedge maze in The Shining. 

The next day, which only felt like Groundhog's Day, we approached the same ticket counter behind which stood an unsmiling, monosyllabic ticket agent. She attached an ID tag to my daughter's suitcase and pointed us toward Security.  

Syd and I were sweating it out because she didn't have her I.D., and we knew it would be dicey explaining things to TSA. Syd's an anxious flyer as it is. Just as we approached the first TSA officer, I realized that I didn't have a gate pass. I've never walked up to a ticket counter with one of my kids and not been asked if I wanted a gate pass. Granted, Syd is 20 now, but tiny as a waif and still in braces, so she looks like someone who would need a grownup to get her to the gate. 

Since I had my mind on my daughter and the intensified security measures she'd be up against, I didn't think to ask for a pass, and I think I had a better excuse than the ticket agent. The officer suggested I go get my pass while they got started with Syd. I walked up to the same ticket agent and smiled.

"I need a gate pass." My request was pleasant enough, I thought, considering my resentment of this woman.

"You didn't ask for one," she said. 

"Because it usually comes up in the converSAtion," I replied. 

When I rejoined Syd, she was standing near a lectern behind which stood a different TSA agent. He was telling her to name a landmark, and at first Syd looked a little blank.

"He means near where we live, honey."

"Don't answer for her ma'am," said the agent.

I didn't think I was. Syd answered a whole slew of questions like that while the officer relayed her answers to someone over the phone. She passed with flying (no pun intended) colors, but still had to be patted down. After that we made it to the "other side," the land of book stores, gift shops, bars and restaurants and gates. 

Syd and I each had a sandwich and a bottle of tea which cost me around $20. Silently, I longed for the days when she was delighted with brown bags of peanut butter sandwiches, string cheese and sliced apples. Sadly, she's had the audacity to grow up. 

And she wasn't the only one of us who'd been detained by TSA. When she was a kindergartner and her brother was about three, we were at the airport with my mother, waiting to be cleared for a flight from Maryland to Michigan. I'd left my driver's license at home after taking it out to scan or copy or something, because someone had mentioned that we might also go to Canada.   

My mother was in her eighties by that time and seated in a wheelchair while we waited at Security and I tried to think of what to say. When I couldn't get cleared, someone from the airport wheeled my mother to the gate while I stood there watching them disappear into the distance. A friend later suggested that if I'd mentioned that my mother was due for her diaper change, the requirement for my picture I.D. would have been miraculously waived. 

I looked around at the other passengers waiting to be screened and spotted a woman in an Army uniform who had chaperoned a school field trip with me a few months earlier. She vouched for me, displayed her own substantial credentials, and TSA let me through. When the kids and I caught up with my mother (who did not wear diapers, by the way), my pulse rate was approaching tachycardia.

Syd made the flight out to see her father without much problem considering, and when it was time to fly home, she and her dad knew to expect another round of enhanced identification measures. But when they asked her questions this time, they were all about Baltimore and the area where her father lives. He's moved at least twice since we all lived in Maryland, and Syd couldn't answer the questions. 

I got on the phone with the TSA officer and willed my head not to explode. Patiently he explained that I was the wild card that got Syd on the flight to Maryland, and her father was the wild card coming back. When she couldn't supply any solid facts linking herself to him, she was grounded. It made sense, and I was grateful not to be a TSA agent having to explain policies like this to furious parents of kids traveling without I.D. 

I offered to send a picture of her birth certificate, but the agent said he couldn't accept anything electronic. Eventually someone put a supervisor from the airline on with me who suggested I send a picture of Syd's birth certificate. I know, that's what I thought. 

"I offered to do that," I told her, "but they said they can't accept anything electronic."

"I know,'" said the supervisor, "but I'll print a copy."

I wasn't about to ask how that was any more legitimate than me texting the same birth certificate directly to TSA. I guess it's that TSA agents aren't allowed to use printers? I'm still confused, but it got Syd on the flight and that's all that mattered. 

Talking to her father later, I said, "I'm so glad I had her birth certificate."

"You couldn't have thought of that last week?" he asked, and we laughed and laughed. Actually, we didn't.

Flying isn't what it used to be. But I'll bet if Syd could have walked up to those agents and flashed her junior pilot pin, they'd have ushered her straight through.