A Travel Vignette

Random Grandmas At the Ready

I noticed the young mother because she was alone and in charge of three beautiful children. The oldest, a girl, looked to be only 6 or 7 years old. The middle one, a boy, was probably around 4. And in her arms she carried the third child, an infant not quite one year of age. She and I were waiting at the same airport gate and appeared to be sharing a flight to the west coast. I always feel sympathetic toward young women traveling alone with small children. In my experience, commercial air travel resembles nothing so much as tortuous ordeal conjured up from the fiery abyss. It is easy to imagine that a young mother alone with small children, in an air travel environment, is invariably under stress.

A large number of the passengers were crowding about the gate, even though boarding had not yet begun. People who will be boarding the airplane late in the process often have a curious tendency to crowd around the gate. I'm not sure what accounts for that, but one suspects it may be the same thing that causes the last people who ordered at Starbucks to barge their way up to the counter to congregate right where the drinks are being delivered. They are apparently oblivious to all of the other people who ordered before them, and who are still there, waiting on their own drinks.

At any rate, the young mother, with her three kids in tow, was soon surrounded by, and in close quarters with, a crowd of anxious travelers milling about. It was at this point that her babe-in-arms began to cry. The baby was coughing and slightly gagging and alarmingly red in the face from all his protestations. The now worried mother was trying to hurry and extricate herself from the crowd while simultaneously attempting to keep her other children close beside her. She eased her way over to a nearby trashcan, at which point the baby's gagging became more acute. Alarmed, the young mother managed to turn her baby's face toward the trashcan just in time for the baby to eject the contents of his stomach all over the outside of the can.

You may not be surprised to learn that the baby's vomit acted as a kind of instantaneous force field for that young family, with all of the crowding travelers suddenly far less interested in milling about the lonely mother and her kids.

It was then, just as the perimeter around the young woman began to expand, that I first noticed her tears.

Quietly, without hysterics or sobbing, the tears began flowing in a steady, silent stream. She had taken some tissues out of her pack and was trying awkwardly and without success to clean off the exterior of the trashcan with one hand, while holding her crying baby with the other. She was doing this while simultaneously trying to keep a wary eye on her other two children.

By now, the crowd was giving her a very wide berth indeed, and no one wanted to go anywhere near the trashcan. As the empty space around her continued to grow, the young woman's tears continued to flow and she seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by her predicament.

And it was then, just in the nick of time, that the random grandmas came to her rescue. I say they were grandmothers but I don't really know. They all looked to be about the right age for being grandmothers, and they all acted like they knew a thing or two about young mothers with children.

Out of the blue, and in the midst of her tears, the young woman and her children were descended upon by these three older women brandishing huge smiles along with plastic containers full of disinfectant wipes. They surrounded the young family (the image of how musk oxen form a circle to protect their young briefly flashed through my mind) and when, presently, one of the grandmothers noticed the flowing tears, they all put their arms around the harried mom and assured her that things were going to be ok.

Two of the grandmothers took charge of cleaning up the baby's aromatic deposit, while the third woman ushered the mother and her children up to the front of the line. The tears were still proceeding at a steady flow, but there was now a smile on the young woman's face, and a needless series of apologies on her lips.

We travel through airports and on planes and, for my part at least, I don't consider the extent to which I may be in company with people who are carrying heavy burdens, or perhaps weighed down by loneliness.

And though you never really know what's going on in a stranger's life, it's comforting and gratifying to discover that there is a sturdy platoon of grandmas who stand ready to do battle in the cause of tenderness and compassion. And they apparently each come armed with an enormous supply of disinfectant wipes.