Things happen for a reason (even bad drives to the airport)

We left for the Manchester airport with plenty of time to spare. I almost always leave a lot of time for getting to the airport, but this was extreme even for me, by necessity. My sister Sarah had been warned by a TSA official that she needed to be there at least ninety minutes before departure, and she didn’t want to take any chances that she’d miss her flight home to D.C.

The personal discussion with TSA authorities about what time she should arrive at the airport transpired because during her 48-hour visit to my parents and me, she’d lost her driver’s license. It turns out that boarding a plane without photo ID isn’t exactly impossible, as she found out when she called the airport on Saturday to explain the problem; it just requires a lot of extra steps. So she was ready to leave at 2:15 Sunday afternoon for her 4:40 flight.

We were making good time and doing fine until suddenly we weren’t. One missed exit led to a wrong turn which led to a slow back road with a lot of traffic lights, and before long we were running thirty minutes behind schedule and still hadn’t reached the airport. Never mind getting there “at least an hour and a half early” as the TSA official had instructed Sarah; we risked not even being there the one hour in advance normally required of air travelers these days.

For Sarah, it was a stressful half-hour to cap off a stressful weekend. Mishaps from her short solo journey to Massachusetts included the wrong city on her original itinerary, the loss of her driver’s license and other documents, hours squandered searching for the lost items which did not turn up, and now the prospect of missing her flight at a time that she really needed to get home. In between calamities, we’d had a great visit, but it was turning into a bad ending to a problematic two days.

At exactly one hour before her scheduled departure time, I pulled up to the curb outside Southwest departures. She grabbed her bags and dashed in, telling me there was no point in my staying with her; even if she had to rebook for a later flight, she wasn’t going to want to leave the airport again. I, meanwhile, was holding out a glimmer of hope that it would all work out and she’d make the flight. In my experience, that’s just how it often goes: the things you’re absolutely certain aren’t going to work out are the things that in the end do work out.

As I drove home, I thought about the various things that had gone wrong for Sarah and how they fit in with my belief that everything happens for a reason, but a lot of the time we simply don’t know what that reason might be. Missing an exit and making a wrong turn had taken us thirty minutes off our intended course, but maybe it had also taken us out of the path of an accident. Looking for Sarah’s missing documents on Saturday prevented the two of us and my mother from going for a hike we’d planned on, but maybe a worse calamity would have happened on the hike. For that matter, in the course of the search, my mother had moved their truck to check under it – and discovered in doing so (with no bad consequences) that the truck’s brakes were starting to fail. So maybe the lost license actually prevented a much bigger problem from happening involving the truck.

You just never know, but it helps to believe, as I do, that there’s a positive meaning behind these seemingly needless frustrations. And there’s always the matter of perspective. Sarah’s motivation for visiting on this particular weekend was primarily to see my father, who had been very sick over the summer but is rapidly improving. Last time Sarah was in town, my father was in the ICU and Sarah didn’t necessarily think she’d ever see him at home again; this weekend she saw him heading out on the tractor to mow the fields. A lost ID, even a missed flight, would have seemed a trivial price to pay back when she was sitting with him in the ICU had she known how much he would eventually recuperate.

The drive home seemed easy. I followed the signs and found my way along the highway with no problems at all. As I reached the exit for Carlisle, my phone rang. It was Sarah, calling just before boarding her flight, the one she’d planned to take all along. “Turned out to be no problem!” she crowed. “I found a TSA official and told him about my lost ID; they had to ask me some questions and make some phone calls, and then they hustled me right to the gate and I’m about to board!”

She gave me a moment to absorb the good news, then told me the best part. “And the TSA guy congratulated me for my good judgment in arriving at the airport so early.”