About Face!

Last weekend, I had the (unfortunate?) opportunity to work a rare 4-day trip. I say rare, because in the company’s great “wiz-dumb,” as a cost-cutting measure, they have been sending us out on 1-day trips like mad, allowing them to save on hotel costs and allowing me the privilege to fly back and forth to Denver so often that the gate agents think I somehow can’t make up my mind which direction I need to be going. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if I know myself!

Normally, I just glide on through the airport, letting time slip by, moving from flight to flight without really making any significant observations. When you work right in the public spotlight at almost every waking minute, you tend to shut out everything, simply for a few minutes worth of peace of mind – sort of a mental R & R break. This past Monday was different, somehow.

Not really aware of the reason, I found myself actually looking at people, traveling in the airport. When I was younger, I used to sit in places like malls or park benches and just observe people – their faces, their actions and their unconscious expressions (the ones they put across without really being aware of it). In high school, I even tried a social experiment for my Psychology class where a friend of mine and I had someone lock one side of a dual glass entry door at the mall, then posted a huge sign with red letters stating “Door Broken: Use Other Door” and then sat back and observed how many people actually approached the locked door, attempting to open it with the sign blaring right in their face. You’d be surprised how often people really do!

Anyhow, I digress…

So I found myself actually looking at people as I moved from flight to flight on Monday. I’m not sure why I was doing it but something prompted me to really look at the faces of the people traveling that day, and I wanted to share my observations with you.

People can really emit their personality in milliseconds just by looking at their faces. There’s the uptight businessman, who’s got the weight and pressure of his job crushing his psyche and taking years off his life in the process. How about the lost soul, how’s unsure of where they are, where they came from and which direction they are headed, a look of panic emanating from their eyes. There are the doting moms, the scolding moms, the moms who’ve “had it up to here!” and the moms who’ve learned to shut out the cries of protest from the three young kids she’s got in tow, who won’t leave each other alone.

Over there, a proud military man in camo-gear, chest out, shoulders back, shipping out; an exhausted soldier in camo-gear, hobbling on crutches, coming home.

There’s the newlywed couple, constantly glancing in each other’s eyes, heads tilted in towards each other; the elderly couple, gingerly helping one another get to their next flight, who look just as in love as the newlyweds. And there’s an elderly couple soon after, who respond to each other with loathing and guile, obviously bound together by tradition and duty, but the love’s long since vanished.

The point of all this is to show that not one of these people spoke to me directly. It was their faces – their body language – that told the tale. There were so many others that I omitted simply because I could continue indefinitely. In simple terms though, we are an interesting species, with the ability to communicate without uttering a single word. An ingenious ability, and not unlike my cat Zach, who can’t utter a single word, and yet can tell me exactly what he wants or what he needs through his body language. You’ve never seen a kitty smile? Look very closely – it’s there.

Zach’s face tells many stories too. It’s speaks of his affection for me when I return home from my trips, gets excited when the treats get handed out, communicates his need for human touch when he bumps his head on mine, fulfills his desire for comfort when he lays down next to me in bed and purrs up a storm, kneading my neck with his “never quite dull enough” claws.

I suppose that I have gotten too caught up in the daily mundane, to really stop and observe people. Perhaps we, as a society, have isolated ourselves enough not to care. The old proverb that one truly cannot understand the heart of a man until one has traveled a mile in his shoes really speaks to me here because I find myself really closing out the world around me at times and only focusing on the here and now, limiting my own vision to the yesterdays and tomorrows I’ve yet to…face.

Sometimes life hits you right between the eyes!

Do we always know when things aren't as bad as they may seem? Somehow I doubt it and every once in a while, life takes a moment to remind us of that very thing.

Recently, I was working a flight from San Francisco to Boston. I was informed by the customer service agent that a customer needing an aisle wheelchair was being boarded in my first class cabin. For me, that is not an unsual statement -- more and more these days, people with various disabilities are finding the courage and the ability to travel by air, so this didn't seem all that out of the ordinary.

As this passenger was boarded, I could see several people assisting this man into his seat on the aisle, and a woman at his side who was totally and completely attentive to his every need. This man, looking to be in his late thirties, seemed happy, although he was unable to speak -- but the smile on his face indicated that he was doing alright under the circumstances. In many ways, with all the equipment that accompanied him, he reminded me somewhat of Stephen Hawking, the disabled super genius. The thought crossed my mind on several occassions during the flight.

I incorrectly assumed that the woman attending to him was either his sister or his attending nurse. To my surprise, she was his wife! As the flight commenced, I let this woman know that I was there for her if she needed anything at all, and then, not to offend him, I turned to him, looked him straight in the eyes and said, "I hope your flight today is relaxing and fun for you, and you let your wife know if you need anything from me, go right ahead and ask." You could see his pleased look right from his eyes and his wife thanked me. I returned to my duties.

The flight to Boston from San Francisco is well over five hours, and with the weather systems we were flying around that afternoon, it was going to push six this time around. That is a long time for someone who can't move on under their own power to sit. Yet all throughout the flight, the woman spent a lot of time massaging his legs, tending to his comfort and talking to him. It seemed that his every need was taken care of, and his wife never went out of her way to ask for anything above and beyond any other passenger on the flight.

At the end of the journey, as we began our decent, I inquired of the couple as to the purpose of their travels. To my utter amazement, the woman says to me, "Henry, here, is going to address the faculty, staff and honor students at M.I.T. tomorrow!" Did I mention that I thought he reminded me of Stephen Hawking? I looked at him directly again and told him, "Congratulations! Knock 'em dead!" to which he responded with a gutteral sound -- his wife started laughing and then she teared up and told me that I had made his day and that he was very happy to hear me say that. I smiled, but on the inside, I felt somewhat embarassed, not really understanding why.

As the wheelchair assistants arrived to pick up Henry, something else estonishing occurred. Four children appeared from the coach cabin, ranging in ages from 16 down to 8. These were Henry's biological children! His eldest son helped to raise Henry from his seat into the wheelchair, while the other three kids gathered his things and jacket -- not one note of complaint or dissent among the four of them.

I looked at Henry's wife as she began to trouble over every little detail and said to her, "I have really enjoyed having you aboard today -- your family has really reminded me of how selfish I have allowed myself to be about trivial problems I may have at home -- I have truly gained a new perspective today." She teared up once again and turned, gave me a big hug then said to me "You have really made our trip so pleasurable -- Thank you!"

It turns out that Henry suffers from a form of adult-onset Cerebral Palsy, and that in his younger days, he was full of life, a star athlete and an honor student in college. He and his wife were college sweethearts and during their first eight years of marriage, had four beautiful children and he was working in a successful computer firm in San Jose. Then their lives changed forever with the diagnosis and Henry's condition rapidly deteriorated.

There's a commercial on television these days that states "Life comes at you fast." I would say -- simply meeting someone who's living that mantra, and making the best of a bad situation inspires me to be more grateful for what I do have, and less focused on my seemingly miniscule problems in comparison. I thank the heavens for allowing me to learn a valuable lesson from an extaordinary man and his family!