Claire-Adele is quite the traveler. At the age of seventeen, she has been to every continent except South America and Antarctica. Image our surprise when we were at SeaTac last Thursday morning at 4:00 a.m. for our 5:50 flight to New York and she got tagged in security with a not empty water bottle.
"It had less than three ounces of water," she said. "You are allowed three ounces."
Not in a liter sized bottle.
"They let me bring water on a plane in Dubai," she said.
The airport in Dubai isn't run by TSA.
This was Claire-Adele's special water bottle. I had found it on the sidelines of one of the Boy's soccer games when I was the team mom in charge of picking up their lost and leftover crap. No one claimed the blue Nalgene bottle so it sat in our cabinet next to the rest of our tall, skinny, bicycle water bottles, lonely and unloved until one Claire-Adele adopted it.
"Where did you get this bottle?" she asked. "I love it. Everyone at camp has a Nalgene."
Shortly thereafter, this bottle was covered in camp stickers and she carried it with her everywhere. It had traveled with her to New York for Spring Break, and to camp for a month this summer where she was a summer intern.
Her backpack had made it through the x-ray, but it was stopped because they thought one of her books was a laptop. When the twenty-something (maybe even nineteen-something) TSA guy, fresh on the four a.m. shift, saw the backpack, he pulled Claire-Adele in her lululemon tights and jacket over to the side to dig through her bag. The book was fine. The water bottle was not.
Jack, the Boy and I didn't hear the conversation between Claire-Adele and the TSA guy, but we saw him grab her bottle. Ugh, I thought as he walked away with her bottle. She loved that bottle. Oh well. I thought of the many water bottle graveyards I had seen at entry ways to x-ray scanners at airports. Large plastic tubs, filled with dead water bottles. I remember seeing families chug water or gatorade in line, just to keep their bottles. We did once at an airport, passed the bottle around until it was empty so it wouldn't float away in the TSA liquid-filled water bottle garbage pile.
The three of us waited for Claire-Adele to move it along, but she stayed at the TSA table with her backpack open.
"Let's go," Jack said.
"I am waiting for my water bottle," she said.
What? No, no, no. Honey, he is going to dump it in the trash.
"No, he is going to empty my water and bring me my bottle back," she said.
What?! The three of us stared at her in disbelief. She didn't cry or nash her teeth or anything at this guy. She acted it like it was perfectly normal for a TSA agent to take her bottle back to the front of the line, dump the water, send it back through the x-ray machine and bring it back to her.
Is life unfair? Yes it is, but sometimes it is unfair in our favor. It pays to be young and hot.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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