The busiest airport in the world is relatively quiet early in the morning. I ride the escalator up to Departures. A tiny dark-haired woman, airport lanyard for a necklace, carefully wipes the grime of a thousand hands from the glass partition between us as she works her way down the other escalator. Our eyes meet. I smile. She nods and re-focuses on her task.
Through Security, up in Terminal 1C, the vendors are rolling open the doors to the bookstores and restaurants and kiosks. Quietly queued for their Egg McMuffins, the McDonald’s customers are sleepy or lost in thought. At Café Zoot, as if selling me a latte is a joy not a job, the tall man beams when he takes my order, wishes me safe travels in an accent I can’t place, and passes my ticket to the barista who is chattering in Spanish with the short guy who just emerged from the back room carrying a towering stack of cardboard cups.
I balance my latte and roll my suitcase toward the gate, avoiding the wheelchair attendant pushing a frail, grey-haired woman through the increasing crowd. Outside the windows, I can see the baggage handlers on the tarmac throwing luggage onto the conveyer while a guy in a neon yellow vest climbs back into a fuel vehicle. The gate agent announces boarding will begin shortly, and I look at my United app, designed by some team of faceless engineers and coders, which enables me to book this flight, pay for this flight, and track this flight.
What would our great-grandfathers think—they who sailed across the Atlantic in the lowest decks of creaky ships and took the canal boats and trains to the Mississippi to buy a team and a wooden wagon to cross the prairie until they found “the spot.”
Airports are remarkable.
I buckle myself into seat 13C and consider whether the pilot got a good night of sleep, and I pray the air traffic controller is as focused on his work as was the little woman cleaning the escalator. I am dependent on a cast of thousands to get me to my destination. As we take off, the sky is pink.
—–
It’s early evening. Outside the hospital, at the other end of the day and the other side of the country, again the sky is pink.
Up in the neonatal intensive care unit, I sit by Incubator #7. I’m slightly mesmerized by the screen tracking my grandson’s vital statistics. Proof of life. Beeps and clicks and hums. So many wires. So many tubes. How does a person intubate a baby who weighs less than a loaf of bread? Or insert the PICC line into a gossamer vein? Who are these people quietly coming and going on their rubber-soled shoes, like a troupe of choreographed dancers, caring for my grandson and the one hundred other tiny babies up here on Level 2?
What would our great-grandmothers think—they who birthed their babies in the lowest decks of creaky ships or in the sod huts on the lonely prairies only to watch one-in-five of those little ones die.
Hospitals are remarkable.
I shift my gaze to a horizontal syringe filled with 27 milliliters of milk. Five teaspoons. Who invented this machine, which continuously and evenly and automatically—slowly, ever-so-slowly—dispenses those five teaspoons over the course of an hour-and-a-half into an impossibly narrow feeding tube that someone else (who?) has threaded down my grandson’s impossibly narrow esophagus? Who are the people who dream up these machines? Who builds them? Who fixes them? Who cleans them?
My grandson is dependent on a cast of thousands to get him to his due date. I feel overwhelmed and a bit adrift in a sea of people I can never know, let alone thank. I reel my mind back to this hospital, this incubator, this baby, these beeps and clicks and hums. As the Psalmist said: Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
—–
When I leave the hospital, as quiet as the morning airport, the sky is now black. Tonight while I sleep, a nurse will care for my grandson, even as her own children and husband are at home in their beds. And before dawn breaks, an air traffic controller will climb into the tower, and a tiny woman will grab her rag and carefully wipe the grime of a thousand hands from the glass partition of the airport escalator.
