Baggage, Bewilderment, and You

A few days after last week's unfortunate ankle incident, I had to take a last minute trip out of town. Rather than schlepping through two airports on crutches, I decided to swallow my pride and hitched a ride in a wheelchair. Yup, it was just me and the elderly.

My first flight went smoothly and I made it through airport security in record time. It was almost as great as the time I was on crutches during a family trip to Disneyland. Almost.

On my return flight there were 4 or 5 other persons needing wheelchairs and, for some reason, the Phoenix airport only assigns one wheelchair attendant for two wheelchairs. Once this poor man finally hauled me and his other charge, a very sweet elderly woman, to the baggage claim, he asked about our bags. After I described mine he turned to my comrade. "How many bags do you have, ma'am?" "Oh, I'm not sure" she replied in a very sweet but clueless voice. "Okay, well do you have your baggage claim tickets?" The woman was getting confused and starting to look a bit flustered. "I don't know what those are. . ." she trailed off. He explained about baggage claim tickets and, after a fair amount of rummaging, she extracted her ticket sleeve from somewhere in the depths of her purse, presenting it to the attendant with pride. "It looks like you have two bags, then. What color are they?" She looked at him with complete confidence and replied "Black."

Now, I feel it important to pause in this narration and note three things. First, we were standing right in the middle of a busy airport's baggage claim with many, many people walking past, the majority of which were wheeling black suitcases. Second, seeing as she couldn't remember how many bags she had, I'm going to go out on a limb on this one and say that she didn't remember what, exactly, they looked like. Third, I watched this poor man's countenance fall pretty noticeably at this point in their amusing, at least from my perspective, interchange.

To his credit, he was extremely polite and patient through our whole airport parade and maintained that helpful attitude while checking the claim tags on every single black bag that rumbled past us.

Oh, and they finally found her suitcases. One black, one blue.