City lights
My 14-year-old daughter’s careful façade – a sturdy amalgam of teenage ennui and profound self-involvement – recently crumbled under a tower of unbridled glee. For days, she was slapstick with giggles and grins and oh boy oh boys: she’s off for three weeks to Canada.
She’s off to steer her grandmother through glittering shops whose target market she emblemises; through the big city throngs and bustle that will thrill and alarm this small town girl. Then off to the rock and pine islands, to the loon cries and wide starry nights of the cool cool lakes of the north. (And waterskiing and tubing and flirting with preppy boys in speedboats. Oh my.)
So yesterday it was car to train to train to shuttle and, oof, to the Paris airport. 90 minutes in the check-in line filled with Oh Canadians – each maple leaf sighting making me a little more dreamy about long ago sweet easy summers. Dumb wrangles at the counter, more nudging and trudging then suddenly stuck in a bunched-up herd and being told, don’t move: it’s a bomb scare, bomb, that black bag, it’s a bomb.
We’re not really convinced, so jostling for a look at the great empty space between a crowd now split in two – lined up, staring like across the battle plain in Braveheart. They’ve cordoned off a huge area in front of the gates. Dogs have moved in, soldiers in fatigues and still their teens, machine gun-ready, badged personnel on walkie-talkies and nobody seeming too sure about procedure.
Elbowing and grumbling, we’re yelling out free advice. Then we remember, and near at once all fall still into a hush of reverence and dread. Full silence and slumping into a shared ugly daydream of smoke and shards and loss of immunity.
Wondering about headlines and what it is to be at the mercy of mindless imperialist thugs, dehumanised by the sudden ambush of all the worst that humanity has to offer. The lives of the strangers around you take on an exaggerated tragic nobility as you prepare mentally for the sadness of their (and your own) passing.
It ends without event, and your daughter has begun to move with the crowd to the gate – her cockiness fully restored by the thought of travelling over oceans alone. She kisses you and says, ‘Aw jeez, mom, don’t cry.’
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