... that the Kid and I find ourselves in O'Hare, Terminal 3, Baggage Claim area 6ish or so. The rest of the folks from his school & their parish will be flying in, landing in roughly an hour, and we're to meet them here to catch the bus for the two hour and change trip to South Bend.
And here we are. He with his Nintendo, me with the laptop & digital camera, Boingo wi-fi wafting through the airways, a signal my laptop snapped onto instantly, recognizing it from last month's trip through Minneapolis. No muss, no fuss - a two-minute point, click, upload, connect, post endeavor.
I have fond memories of O'Hare. In 1987 or so, a group of us from L&C went to a radical campus activists' gathering hosted by Rutgers in scenic Piscataway, NJ. I don't remember who made the reservations (Eli? Linda? Robert? Moi?) - but for whatever reason, we had an overnight layover here in the United terminal, the one with the music & light installation created by Philip Glass. We spent the night cruising up and down the moving pedestrian walkways, staring up at the lights, basking in the music.
This is not that trip. Nintendo bugs the crap out of me generally, and it's all I can do to not will the batteries to die. He'd be upset and bored, and ... well, we're not going on a flight today, so riding up and down the Philip Glass corridor isn't an option.
Instead, we've got the floor on which we sit, a Starbucks fifty or so feet away, and the Kid is singing along to the Nintendo game. I'm online, rambling incoherent about the ubiquitious nature of communication these days.
Chicago was good, but I've gotta admit - I'm really eager for the kid to be a few years older, so he can explore more of the things that I fell in love with in the city years ago. That is, if I can pry his fingers away from the glowing tinny box. Oy.
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