May 2, 2005 – A Three-Day Weekend in El Paso

May 2, 2005 – A Three-Day Weekend in El Paso

It’s Friday April 29, 2005 and Austin, Texas is in for an over-90-degree-Fahrenheit day, but I will be long gone by the time it hits that high. I’m winging my way West to El Paso and a visit with my family: Southwest Airlines 95, leaving Gate 8 at 9:00 AM CDT—one folding wardrobe bag containing a suit, two changes of jeans and some dress shirts (my home away from home) to check and a carry-on PC bag containing two Sony Vaio Laptops, that was a pain to take through Bergstrom Airport security.

I’m operating on two nights of little sleep—Wednesday only three hours, Thursday only five hours—and I doze at Gate 8 from about 8:00AM to 8:50AM, my PC bag on end atop my lap serving as a pillow. I awake to find the plane about the board, take a quick toilet break, and return just in time to be the last to board the plane. Traveling alone on Southwest with one carry-on you can board any time as there is always a seat available unless the gate agent miscounted. I find an aisle four rows back from the front, a middle-aged Mexican couple: husband at the window wife in the middle seat. They’re holding hands—his right, grasping her left, his, the hand that earns their living, one with character, one that has known hard work and not complained. Her’s is likewise a hand that labors—not an ornamented hand of leisure. They’re both wearing jeans. I greet them with “good morning,” settle into my seat and resume my slumber.

An hour and a half later, we land at El Paso International Airport, where my sister VY works. She has promised to meet my plane when I arrive and drive me home. As I clear the jet way, I see the familiar airport terminal where 40 years before my wife IM and I used to walk as a pass-time, before there was anything resembling airport security. Back then the tearful reunions and goodbyes happened at the gate not before an armed checkpoint. The terminal had been remodeled and expanded extensively in the near half-century since we roamed the corridors.

VY was at the bottom of the escalator—moved from the last time I flew in via Southwest—waiting to meet me when I arrived. We walked to baggage claim at the front of the terminal and waited no more than five minutes for my bag to be expelled onto the luggage carousel. Gathering my belongings, we walk back through the shopping arcade on the left of the terminal as you walk toward the gates. We exit the arcade to an outdoor smoking area and VY uses her security card to pop a security gate that gives us access to the airport employee parking lot.

As we walk we catch up about her job at the airport, where she went to work, shortly before 9/11 changed U.S. airports forever. My sister has always been a fashion conscious woman who dresses impeccably and today she wears a dark blue woman’s business suit, a lanyard around her neck with security card and picture id. She exchanges greetings with airport employees as we walk about. In the employee parking lot, we find her aging Japanese two-door sedan. “No new car?” I inquire. “It’s paid for,” she says, “and it runs and does not cause me any trouble.”

We catch up as she drives me out the airport on Airport Boulevard then right onto Airport Road. As we head due north, off to our right is the airport and at our left is Ft Bliss Army Base where my father was stationed on and off during his military career. Airport Boulevard curves hard left heading west where the airport property ends and the remains of long closed Biggs Air Field begins—the Army now controls the property. As we come out of the turn we’re on Fred Wilson Avenue. We cross under Texas Highway 54, a high-speed freeway which runs north into New Mexico and we eventually end up at the light on Dyer Street where we turn left toward our house in the Morningside Heights development just beyond William Beaumont Army Hospital on our right.

We arrive at home and I’m a son again, no longer the parent and grandparent that I am in California. Here I’m the returning son coming home to visit my parents who still view me as the young boy who left home over 40 years ago to start the life that has been lived. Now, here at home where I grew up, my parents and I are different yet very much the same. I’ve come to reassure myself that they are well and to come to understand them better while we all still have a chance to do so. Before she leaves for work, I ask my sister VY to have dinner with me on Saturday when my Mom and Dad typically go to church and to see if we can get our other sister LC to come along. Neither my parents nor LC is into dining out all preferring to prepare meals at home, but it’s worth a shot.

Alone with my parents I sit down to a quickly prepared breakfast—I’m starving having left Austin without eating and Southwest not providing anything but junk food which I missed because I was sleeping through the beverage service. AV, Mom's housekeeper and cook for many years, prepares the meal, exactly as my mother has instructed her. It’s wonderful, two eggs over easy with four strips of bacon and a plate of fried rice, coffee and orange juice. We talk as I eat, me explaining about the latest antics of their great-grandchildren, them telling me the latest births and deaths in the local community of friends. My father’s long time friend Mr. Upton had a cross-eyed white cat and he is now purring and doing figure eights around my ankle beneath the chair. Later today, my father has promised to take me by the building he has built to contain all of Mr. Upton’s belongings. My mother is asking to have me show pictures of her great grandkids I’ve got stored on Ofoto. I’m at home and enjoying the warm feeling of being a son again and I feel young again.