Spring Break

Week before last, I went to the airport to head out of town on a brief trip for work, one of those trips where you're in transit almost longer than you're at the destination.  It was late morning.  I left my car at the airport park-and-ride lot and boarded the shuttle for the terminal.

They probably were the last people to board the shuttle; I assume they were a family, parents with their child, but I don't actually know that for sure.  The child didn't say much (and not anything that I could understand) so I got no information on the relationship from listening to what the child said.

I don't know how old he was but he was small, and I'm guessing he was older than his size would suggest but I don't know that either.  He had obvious physical deformities, the kind that elicit both pity and curiosity.  I don't know, medically, what the child's condition was, but he might have some syndrome associated with craniosynostosis, in which the sutures of skull close too soon, and the growing brain forces the eyes forward in their sockets. There he was on the shuttle bus and his parents sat on the empty row of seats facing me and expected the child to sit in between them, but he didn't.  Instead, he climbed on to the seat next to me.  I asked his parents if they would like to trade seats with me.  Not, they said, that's not necessary, but his father moved to a seat on the bus's back row so he was closer to his son.

The child clutched with his left hand a computer tablet in a thick red plastic case, with a child's game open, and with his right hand he held on to my arm.  His mother asked me if that was all right.  I said I had three children.  Later I realized that really wasn't an answer, but what I meant was that I was happy help another mother's child, especially if all I had to do was allow him to hang on to me for a few minutes on a shuttle bus.

After the bus started the child said something.  I couldn't understand it, but the father recognized it as "bumpity-bump," as the small bus bounced on rough places in the road.  That's all I remember him saying.  I asked if he could show me how to play the game on the tablet; he didn't seem to have heard me, and there was no response.

When we got to the drop off at the terminal, the mother said to the father, that was more successful than last time.  To the rest of us, she said, last time he cried the whole time.  That's when I realized they had gotten onto the shuttle with no luggage.  They weren't getting off the shuttle to catch a plane; they had driven to the airport to ride the shuttle to the terminal and then back to their car.  I said something about the absence of luggage to the mother and she laughed.  After this, she said, we'll go on our big spring break trip to IHOP.

I didn't ask anything else but I assumed they were working, step by step, on getting their child ready to take a trip.  Or maybe not.  Maybe a ten minute ride on a shuttle bus with strangers was a manageable outing with a child who had the week off from school.  Maybe this was their spring break.

Since then I have thought about them, about the anxieties and worries that they must have, but more about their warmth and their good humor, and how if I were in their situation, I doubt that I would do nearly so well.  Whoever they are, I wish them the best.