Leaving on a Jet Plane (with a leaky toilet)

Christmas day was quiet. My son Rick and I went over to my parents’ house for coffee and gab, and then after the last-minute packing, he dropped me off at the airport. I was through security and sitting at my gate within 45 minutes, leaving me a couple of hours to cool my heels. I spent the first part of it trying to send my mom an e-mail with my return flight info, not knowing that airport internet is no longer free. It didn’t work, needless to say.


Then came an announcement that my flight would be departing from a different gate. So I packed up the laptop, piled up all my stuff, and headed off to the new gate. When I got there, there were no seats because there were two flights waiting in the same area. Then I noticed a couple of Deafs standing around looking confused. It was a middle-aged man and his teenage daughter, and they were waiting for the Denver flight which had just started to board. He wasn’t even supposed to have been allowed this far (through security) since she was over 16, but there was no interpreter available at the airport, and he just made enough of a pain of himself that they finally let him through with her. But when they started boarding the flight and she got in line, they threw her back out of line and they couldn’t understand why. Turns out that airline was boarding in groups according to a number on the ticket, and so far they had only called group 1. She was group 4, so they weren’t about to let her on. I stuck around and kept an ear out and let them know when her group was called. She boarded, and he left.


That’s when the trouble started. An employee got on the mike and announced that our flight would be delayed because while they were housecleaning the flight, they discovered a leaky toilet and needed to fix it. They expected the delay to be about ½ hour.


Not bad. I had a 3-hour layover at LAX ahead of me, so I’d still make it in plenty of time.


Then a while later, another employee comes on and announces that not only was there one leaky toilet, and they could make the six-hour flight with only one toilet operating correctly if they absolutely had to, but also another toilet seemed to have a missing spring, which was considered a fire hazard, and they could not fly with that. They were scouring the airport for a similar plane to find another spring, since BWI was not a maintenance hub that kept parts on hand. Some of us were sitting around wondering out loud why on earth they didn’t just take the spring off the leaky one, but I guess that was just too easy. They did say that if they couldn’t find the part, another plane would be landing around 8:15 p.m. and they could divert that to LAX once it had emptied out and been housecleaned and restocked. In that scenario, we would be about 3 hours late. Oh, and the employee who was making the announcements and keeping us well-informed was leaving because her shift was over, and Merry Christmas, folks.


Okay, I only have a 3-hour layover to start with, and the international departure terminal at LAX is in a completely different terminal than the domestic arrivals, and you have to get there by bus. There’s no way I’m gonna make that flight.


There are times you can do nothing but hit your knees. I had four other women praying with me when they found out that one deaf kid’s adoption would be derailed if I didn’t make that connection, because there’s only one flight out to China per day, and I have to take custody of him 3 hours after we land in order for the timing to stay on track. This whole thing was about to come unglued because of a leaky toilet. Unbelievable.


Can’t tell me prayer doesn’t work. Less than half an hour later, someone got on the mike and said that our plane was fixed and they were going to start boarding immediately. They attributed it to heroic efforts by the mechanics. I know who to attribute it to.


We arrived at LAX only an hour late, and Jen’s smiling face was waiting for me when I got off the plane. We jumped the bus and got to the other terminal in plenty of time.


At this point, I need to interject that you will frequently see me refer to Jen as a sherpa. That’s not at all derogatory; she came up with the phrase herself and uses it repeatedly, and makes jokes on it. Sometimes they’re too funny not to share.


The plane was completely full, which meant we had a seatmate. Jen was window, I was middle, and this guy was aisle. He slept most of the way, didn’t even wake up for meals. I had planned to stay awake for a good portion of the flight myself, to cut down on the jet lag, and sleep the last few hours right before landing and going to get Xiao Tian, but Air China had other ideas. They served a meal pretty much as soon as we got up to altitude, and then they shut the lights out on us. So much for staying up.


Shortly after we crossed the international date line, near the end of the flight, the guy next to me decided to get chatty. Turns out he is a CEO of some billion-dollar real estate development company that is building a number of billion-dollar projects in China, one of which is a new Disney in Wuhan. Now you must understand Wuhan is not exactly a tourist hub. It’s a rather poor province with lots and lots and lots of industrial worker type Chinese people. Turns out what they’re doing is buying up tons of land through the government, moving all these people out and paying their rent during the construction, and then moving them back into apartment buildings, with enough apartments left over to sell at $300K each and make a couple of billion dollars. (Notice how that word billion keeps popping up?) He pointed out one area in the photos he was showing us and mentioned that it was the oldest marketplace in China. I asked if they were planning to preserve that part of the culture, and he replied that there was no culture there, just poverty.


Then he started in with the generalities. He asked if we were going to China. (Hello, we’re on an Air China flight that lands in Beijing…..) Once he had ascertained that we were indeed China bound, he said we’d love it, that ALL Chinese are very nice. Oh, and they all had generations of money, because they never spend any of what they inherit, they just keep adding to it. And all Chinese people must be intelligent, because they managed to learn their own language, and it's HARD. Then he found out that Jen had already adopted from China. Did you know that ALL adopted Chinese children are fun and energetic? (Yeah, our American kids are all boring and lethargic.)


Ever seen a sherpa get pissed off? Don’t go there, man. I was proud of her, though. Even though I could tell she was seething, she merely told him that all of her children were fun and energetic, not just the Chinese one. Then she turned her face to the window and ignored him the rest of the trip.


Which left me to deal with him. He then started in, upon finding out that the child I was adopting was deaf, on how all sign language should be universal. Told him that just wasn’t possible, since each language had a culture of its own that its Deaf population wished to preserve. He kept trying to convince me that they should consolidate, so I finally asked him if he had ever bothered to learn Esperanto. Huh? You know, Esperanto, the language that had no exceptions to the rules. There was a big push on years ago to make that universal, and he should learn it so he would be ready to trade in his English.


That shut the clod up for pretty much the rest of the trip.


I will get even with Jen for leaving me to deal with him alone like that.