I have discovered nothing new on this Sabbatical, but everyday I either learn something I didn’t know or remember something I had forgotten.  We said goodbye to New Zealand on a bright, beautiful fall morning a couple of days ago, flew up to Auckland and then caught a three hour flight to Sydney.  I didn’t know we needed visas to enter Australia.  One hundred and fifty dollars later, I learned something new, and with the help of a kind and efficient Qantas employee (she was apologetic for having to charge us so much) we landed, electronic visa attached to our passports, in Sydney.  

Transition days are emotional for myriad reasons.  The bittersweet feeling of leaving something that has become sweetly familiar and loved; the excitement and anxiety of venturing into another unknown experience; the creeping sadness of knowing the sabbatical has reached its halfway point. I am not sure of the old cliché that sharing sadness with someone you love cuts the sadness in half.  In fact, as may resonate with many of you, sometimes sharing the emotion with someone you love actually amplifies its potency, especially if one of you (like me) tends to get a bit anxious about flying, due not to a fear of being in the air, but of missing the plane.

I am one of those people who prefer to be at the gate two hours early sipping a cup of coffee and reading the paper.  Melissa, on the other hand, loathes downtime.  For her, a perfectly timed arrival coincides with stepping onto the jetway seconds before the crew shuts the door.  We know this about each other; yet, we still negotiate when to leave for the airport.

The night before we left Nelson was no different. Melissa pushed hard for as much sleep as possible while I started my negotiations with a wake up call at first light for a 10:30 am flight.  We agreed we would ask the receptionist at the hotel when she thought we needed to leave and accept whatever she recommended.  As Lyle Lovett sang, “that’s when I knew I had made my first mistake.”

The receptionist asked again for the departure time of our flight: 10:30 am.  She looked at the ceiling, calculating in her head. “Hmm, it takes about 20 minutes to get to the airport.  You should be fine if you leave here at 9:30.” Do the math. Twenty minutes to the airport gets us on the curb, no boarding passes and the gauntlet of security looming between us and the flight with only forty minutes before the plane leaves – not when it boards, when it leaves.  I pleaded with my eyes for Melissa to intervene.  One look at her Cheshire Cat smile and I knew, she knew, she had won.  Suck it up, Cupcake.

At 9:25 am the next morning, having double checked that our cab was on its way, I paced the lobby while Melissa, doing the New York Timescrossword, assured me I had nothing to worry about.  The taxi arrived at 9:34.  Roller bags in hand, I started opening the trunk of his car before he fully braked.  Inside was a large crate of apples, at the sight of which, Melissa sweetly remarked on how lovely they were.  I resisted the urge to chuck them on the sidewalk.  It was T minus 36 minutes to launch.  @#$! the apples.  

As we pulled out of the parking lot, our driver, who could not have been more mellow if he was doing an ad for Uncle Ike’s Pot Shop, casually mentioned that his last customer had left the apples in the car, and he needed to make a stop to deliver them. Frantically, I checked our departure time hoping to find a few extra minutes.  In fact, I discovered to my horror that the actual departure time was 10:25 am.  Thirty-one minutes to lift off and we still had to deliver the @#$! apples.

We pulled up about 100 meters shy of the airport entrance, as close as the driver could get, at 10:00 am. The only good thing about this was it had taken 19 minutes instead of 20 to get to the airport, even with the apple stop.  I was a good 30 meters ahead of Melissa, backpack slung over one shoulder, roller bag wildly bumping over the sidewalk in what must have looked like a cross between a new Olympic sport of speed walking while weighted, or middle-aged male had too much coffee and needs a bathroom.  As I entered the airport, however, I curiously passed through the five stages of missed plane anxiety in a single moment, and landed, unexpectedly, at acceptance.  If we had to spend another night in Nelson, we could do that.  

There is no security for domestic flights in New Zealand.  No, that is not a typo.  There is no security.  What’s more, every single facet of the check-in procedure is automated.  I walked up to a sleek, free-standing kiosk, scanned our passports and stood amazed as it printed our boarding passes and the bar code tags for our luggage, which we attached.  A few meters away, we placed our luggage, one bag at a time, on a conveyer belt, used the bar code reader to scan the bar code and watched as the luggage disappeared down the belt.  The entire process from taxi stop to baggage tagged and loaded took less than five minutes.  We took a seat in a large area around 10:07 and waited precisely three minutes before they called our flight, when everyone boarded, everyone, at the same time, not the gemstones first, i.e. diamond and ruby classes, not Sky Priority, everyone. 

Melissa sat by the window reading, with me on her left staring blankly at the seat in front of me. As the plane pushed back, she patted my leg with a gentle, I told you so touch.

As you can see, I discovered many new things from this experience: automation can be a wonderful thing; a young person at a hotel reception desk knows what she’s talking about; even with an apple stop it takes about 20 minutes to get to the airport; Melissa is right more often than I think.  Perhaps I should have listed that learning outcome first.  

I also remembered something wonderful that I had forgotten.  With no security check before boarding the plane in Nelson, I remembered the delight at being able to leave for a flight less than an hour before departure.  It makes flying almost like boarding a bus or the light rail.  I’d forgotten how delightful that felt.

Still, that isn’t the most important thing I’d forgotten.  I’d forgotten what it was like to live in a community that chooses to trust one another instead of reorganizing itself around fear.  ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other radical groups may or may not be defeated.  It is impossible for those groups to win a war against the U.S. in any event. Still, I cannot help but think they have succeeded in destroying something precious and wonderful about our democracy.  I am not advocating for dismantling TSA, but it would be wonderful if we could find our way back to a society that plays to the good in people instead of managing to the lowest common denominator.  

I am painfully aware, as is everyone, that not more than a month ago, terrorists shattered the innocence of New Zealand with the attacks and murders at Christchurch.  In a victory for justice, the authorities have captured those responsible.  In my mind, however, the real victory was boarding that plane in Nelson with no security check.  I had forgotten that.