Without a rifle-toting ninth-grader, I was left to my own devices.
Do to weather-related delays, I spent ten hours yesterday in the icy clutches of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Here are some things that I learned.
- Airport bookstores can be interesting. Amid the usual horrors (The Five People you Meet In Heaven) and the Special New Embarrassments to American Letters (I Am Charlotte Simmons), I saw, of all things, four copies of Finnegan's Wake. With so many unexpected and deliciously varied forms of literary torment availiable, I wound up with a copy of The End of the Affair. It occurred to me while reading the introduction that one of the nice things about being Catholic is that if you ever decide to quit, then you can refer to yourself as a lapsed Catholic, an identifier that carries with it a degree of panache simply unavailable to ex-Protestants. There's a certain mystique about the lapsed Catholic--people, I imagine, would assume that you had a bad experience with priests, or that you couldn't stomach the theology anymore, or that you've suffered some harrowing existential crisis and you'd rather not talk about it. It's romantic; New York sophisticates and French intellectuals are lapsed Catholics. Lapsed Catholics are allowed to get a bit too drunk at office parties and make awkward confessions of a vaguely inappropriate sexual nature. Lapsed Catholics can allude casually to the horrors of their repressive religious upbringing, even if they grew up in cheerful suburban families. If, on the other hand, you decide to quit being an evangelical Protestant, you have none of these options: you aren't a "lapsed Protestant," you're just plain lame. Lapsed Catholics are suspected of being angry at God; former Protestants are suspected of owning Thomas Kinkade "paintings." Behind the Lapsed Catholic's appearance of strained social convention, you'd expect to find a heady broth of suggestively Byronic emotional problems; underneath the veneer of the ex-Protestant's rebellious apostacy, you'd expect to find a mundane mixture of apathy and laziness.
- I have always felt faintly contemptuous of the sort of person who makes free with disparaging remarks about Oakies/Republicans/ladies with fake fingernails/and other forms of subhuman life from the red states, from the perspective of a presumed sophisticated-man-of-the-world status assumed on the basis of living in some cosmopolitan place. The mere fact of living in a city with a mass transit system and a choice of Starbucks, I want to tell these people, does not automatically make you less ridiculous than the average resident of Oklahoma. We have met the enemy, however, and he is us--one peculiarity of the Dallas airport is that if you want to go to an out-of-the-way airport (say in Shreveport or Lubbock or Abilene) you have to leave the mighty, tram-infested terminal and go to a lesser terminal which services the planes which go to commuter airports. The Mighty Terminal is host to the normal crop of airline passengers: your businesswomen, your dreadlocked Austrailians, the ever-present men in "sportshirts" and loafers with no socks. The Dinky Terminal, where I spent the bulk of those ten hours, is a different world entirely, one inexplicably redolent of barbeque sauce. Men wear giant hats and too-tight jeans; women have sweatpants and giant earrings or hair. Most of the passengers were middle-aged or older, and frequently fat. A rotund, red-faced man and his dumpy wife carried on an altercation in an exaggeratedly slow drawl with the Asian-American employee behind the airline counter. ("No. No. No. No. No. No. No" said the wife, pausing between each to show the awesome magnitude of her disapproval. "Just give us a voucher and a rental car and we'll DRIVE home" boasted the man, apparently somewhat unclear about whether he was proposing a mutually convenient solution or manfully demanding satisfaction for a personal insult. "uh uh. ridiculous. no way" continued the wife.) A more affable fellow looked at me and said "Time to spare, you go by air; when you gotta get there fast, you better drive!" (this he repeated to several times, chuckling at himself in between). Later, while I sat next to a trash can reading a book for about an hour, and no fewer than four different men spat into it.
- I sat with my back to a couple of old Abilenians returning home for Christmas. As it turns out, Man #1 had moved to New York on a lark with no place to stay and no job lined up. Now he works in residential real estate (average cost of home in New York: "over a million dollars") and lives in Manhattan. He didn't have any immediate prospects for marraige in the works, but, finding himself now past thirty, his "mind is more open to something like that." He had this easy, Texas way of talking, though, impossible not to like, and people who can make small-talk, especially about themselves, without sounding frivolous or self-centered or dull always impress me. His voice reminded me of those straight-shooters with short blonde hair from my grade-school days, who went out for little league and knew how to make casual chit-chat with grown-ups and pretty girls, and who had been popular in high school because they managed to be athletic without being thuggish or vulgar, and intelligent without being weird or socially awkward. Whereas most people who enjoy worldly success clearly deserve contempt (read: envy and resentment), this was a man who could speak about his long-term ambition of making "a pile" and retiring young to a big house in the suburbs without implying that such an accomplishment was noteworthy, or that his confidence in achieving it was a sign of awesome masculinity. As I had morally shriveled to dwarvish proportions in the shadow of this paragon of Texan virtue, I turned to get a look at him and was shocked to find myself facing a balding and rather badly dressed man of the Jason Alexander variety. There's something I find unaccountably unsettling, even slightly disturbing, in the appearance of such offhanded grace in an unattractive person; maybe it's only an instance of slavish attachment to an adolescent belief in the importance of beauty and good taste.