IT WAS a bitterly cold late afternoon in February when we arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, according to an electronic billboard we passed on the highway. It was so cold that when I inhaled, the tiny hairs inside my nasal passages turned to icicles, and I felt the onset of hypothermia around the frontal lobes of my brain.
Certain things in this world test my Christian soul—cell phones, airports, the United Nations, the spattering, earsplitting rev of motorcycles, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie—but nothing tests it more than winter. It was no coincidence that I planned our trip so that we would be out of Canada for as much of the winter as possible. It’s not just the snow; it’s the cold, the dry air, the feeling that every drop of moisture is being sucked out of me. I could hardly wait to be in sunny, warm Italy. The weather forecasts there, which I had been monitoring multiple times a day, listed temperatures around seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. I imagined myself attired in an outfit of gauzy fabric, strolling down narrow lanes bordered by tall, blindingly bright white stucco walls and occasionally darting into a sliver of shade to escape a searing noon sun.
At the entrance to the airport terminal I wrestled with a luggage cart from the trolley stand, and was piling on our suitcases when I glanced around and saw Mom hailing nonwhite travellers, assuming they were porters.
I was caught for a split second between screaming “No!” and melting in a puddle of shame on the sidewalk.
I watched her for a moment as she waddled unsteadily along the sidewalk before stopping, with a somewhat bewildered look on her face, and raising her hand for attention. There was a frailty and vulnerability to her that I had never noticed before. At that precise moment I knew that the balance of our parent-child relationship had completely shifted.
“Where are the porters?” Mom demanded imperiously, pounding her cane. A black man in a very smart tan suit was walking briskly in her direction; she started to raise her hand in a gesture to hail him, and he shot her a disapproving look.
“Come on, Mom,” I said gently, catching her by the fold in her jacket sleeve. “They don’t have them anymore, or not many of them. They’re for special cases.”
“Aren’t I special?” she pouted.
“Of course you are,” I soothed. “C’mon. Let’s get our tickets, shall we?”
With one hand on the luggage trolley and the other on her shoulder I slowly turned her around and aimed her toward the check-in counter. I placed one of her hands on the cart’s push bars and then covered it with one of my own hands. It was something I had done countless times with my children to keep them from wandering off. Gosh, was that really more than twenty years ago? The memory of it had all but fizzled out.
At the airline check-in counter a wheelchair was promptly summoned. It arrived with a porter—an efficient, older Indian man.
Mom regarded him with a moment of suspicion before letting him assist her into the wheelchair.
He left us on the other side of the security cordon, and thank goodness, because that’s when my cringe-o-meter went into overdrive.
“Look at all the immigrants!” Mom exclaimed with childish awe when she surveyed the security workers.
Being of a certain generation, my mom figures that if you are not white then you are automatically an immigrant. Yet this is a woman who reads books and newspapers and who watches tv. Had she mistaken the nightly news for serialized episodes of National Geographic?
Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, during one of his many election campaigns, commented that all incoming immigrants should be shot in their boats. I decided not to share that with her.
I did consider jerking her hand and telling her sharply to hush, but people have a tendency to react differently when you do that to a senior than to a child. I did not want to be cited for elder abuse.
Of course, it works the opposite way for seniors. They can apparently abuse their caregivers and make demands with impunity.
Mom’s worldview aside, there was the issue about her physical ability. Based on the few hours we spent in the airport lounge, it was clear she could not do anything without my help. When she dropped something on the floor, I had to pick it up; when I was reading a book or working on a Sudoku puzzle, she would mew about being thirsty, so I would fetch her a drink. Then she would spill some of it and I would have to jump up and get a cloth to mop it up.
The upside of flying with a senior, as I pleasantly discovered, was priority boarding and lots of fussing-over by normally ice-queen flight attendants.
We settled into our seats, and I arranged my little conveniences in the pouch in front of me. Through the small oval window beside my seat I watched the ground crew, huge puffs of frosty breath emanating through the scarves lashed around their faces, finish deicing the plane’s wings. It gives me no comfort to know that a plane that I am sitting in is being deiced.
I turned to my mother. Her tongue was curled around her upper lip as she struggled for a small eternity with the cellophane wrapping on a candy. A thought began to weave and wind itself through my mind: This could be the longest six weeks of my life. I had seriously miscalculated her ability to do anything without assistance, a miscalculation largely borne of her cheerful insistence, “I’m capable of doing anything!”
Her endless stream of questions began on the tarmac and continued thirty thousand feet into the air, regardless of whether I was reading or listening through headphones to the in-flight movie. “Why was the plane delayed?” “Why do so many people travel at the same time?” “Why are there so many immigrants working at airports?” “What’s ‘deicing’ mean?”
After a handful of hours in the air, during which I looked longingly at the emergency exit, she drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, she denied having ever slept and proceeded to complain about everything from the airline food to the too-busy stewards to the location of her seat (I had purposely selected her upgraded seat for its legroom and proximity to the bathroom).
By the time we reached London’s Gatwick Airport, I was wound up tighter than a yo-yo and began second-guessing my staunch refusal to take mood-enhancing medication. I was considering cashing in our tickets and taking the next flight back to Canada when a heavyset porter wearing a turban approached us with a wheelchair. Mom shot me a worried look.
“God, Mom,” I groaned wearily under my breath as I eased her into the chair. “I don’t think he’s with the Taliban.”
“HE’S WITH THE TALIBAN?” she shouted.
Something to remember: There is only one speaking volume used by the hearing impaired.
I gave a sideways glance to the glowering porter and mouthed the word “sorry,” then raised my index finger to my ear and made a few circular motions before pointing to the back of Mom’s head. He accepted this with grudging understanding, gripped the handles of the wheelchair tightly, and led us through customs.
Our flight to Bari was not leaving from Gatwick Airport; it was leaving from Stansted Airport, a fair distance away.
Luckily my beau lives in London. He was only too happy to be our taxi.
As I wheeled Mom out the door of customs, I spied Colin’s lanky frame leaning on the metal barricade, an ever-present newspaper rolled up in his hands. Colin waved and beamed at us. I returned a look that was all rolled eyes and grim face.
“She’s grouchy; lousy f light,” I muttered as Colin and I kissed.
He pulled gently away from me and crouched down in front of my mother.
“Hello there, Val.” Colin spoke kindly, slightly upping the volume of his soft voice for Mom’s benefit. “How was your flight?”
“It