Traveling: US, and early 20th Century Lithuania

Well, well. A new blog post from Matteo, it's about time. Just to inform (warn?) all of my public yearning for more Matteo writings, I've made a goal of writing something up once a week. I'm not saying they'll all be glittering gems, but hopefully I'll get enough practice that I'll finally figure out just what one is supposed to write in a blog someday.

So in the past month I was traveling by air on business. Since it was on business, of course I had my laptop with me. What I've learned is that without a laptop, the business of getting through airline security is kind of like going to the dentist for a regular checkup. For me anyway, this is not so bad. However, going for a regular checkup still means disrupting your schedule, having to participate in idle chit-chat that the dentist and hygenist feel obliged to make even though they're obviously completely uninterested, and the coup de grace: very high-speed tiny machinery operating on your teeth to allow maximal bone conduction of that high-pitched squeal directly into your brain. So not absolutely horrible, but definitely slightly unpleasant.

With a laptop however, my experience passes some internal threshold point where I go from Overused Humor Guy ( "Hey, pretty soon they're going to ask us to strip naked for this, har har.") past it to approach Red-Faced Upset at World Man. I don't have a quote for this archetype, but I saw him driving behind me once in Chicago while I was trying to go only 10mph over the speed limit. I don't think I quite become him, but it's close.

The problem is, when you're going on a trip, the whole goal is to minimize the stuff you have to carry. It's all about efficiency. So you try and get everything to fit inside of a carry-on bag. You do and you are so pleased with yourself. You stand there beaming, thinking of being able to glide past the baggage claim with no waiting. You adopt a devil-may-care attitude about life; it's just you and your savvy packing allowing you to breeze past all of those sad sad people who over-packed and had their luggage sent to Buffalo. Of course this delusion of superiority comes crashing down when you arrive at airline security.

Now all of your careful packing, all of your belongings arranged with tetris-like skill into the only possible place in the three-dimensional space of your bag that they could possibly fit, must be disassembled and spread out amongst various plastic buckets. (Note: If you are an engineer such as myself, a word that comes to mind may be "exploded", as in an exploded view diagram of a piece of machinery. You should resist the temptation of saying this out loud in an airport, especially in relation to the contents of your bag.) The laptop gets its own bucket, of course, which is what pushes me over the edge. It's that extra bucket that brings my bucket total to one-too-many. Because as we all know, laptops are encased in lead, making them extremely difficult to penetrate with x-rays. So they must not be obscured by anything else, like those lead-lined polartec jackets.

In addition to separating and dividing all of your efficiently-packed contents into many piles of stuff, you are also required to take off your shoes. And as you pass through the metal detector and out the other side, you realize that there is absolutely no thought given by anyone to this end of the line. You are basically reduced to the closest approximation of a refugee--carrying random piles of your stuff, with no shoes, struggling to keep your piles of stuff from falling on the floor, as more impatient pseudo-refugees stream behind you, shoelessly struggling with their own piles of stuff. In fact, this may be a good-hearted attempt by our government of remind us of our roots: we or our ancestors were all emigres to this great land of ours. Lest we get complacent and forget this fact, our government has thoughtfully stepped in to give us that huddled-mass experience that we have been so sorely lacking up to this point in time.

While in this situation being transported back to my roots, what always comes to mind is the family legend of how my grandfather's father came to this country. My grandfather's parents were from Lithuania, making him the most interesting part of my otherwise very English extended family. The story of my great-grandfather has been told to me in a sort of sketchy way by my grandmother. Because of this, dates, places, and major conflicts of the time may not be accurate. But the gist of the story is pretty sensational. GGF is a young man of about 15 in Lithuania, living the simple hearty life of pre-1920 Baltic teen. As my grandmother tells it, the Russians are coming to invade. The family springs into panic mode. GGF's mother, being the scrappy, practical woman she apparently was, decides that GGF must not be forced to live under the new occupiers. She hands GGF two things: a rifle and bible, and instructs him to go West young man, to Germany. Where he eventually gets on a boat to America, presumably huddling in steerage with actual masses.

This story has made a big impact on me, especially whenever I think I have real problems. No problems I have ever had even approach having to run from an occupying force at age 15 with only two possessions of note.

But aside from that, I think of this story in the security line of the airport. The first reason it comes to mind is because carrying only two possessions is obviously the most efficient carry-on packing effort ever. The second reason is because my great-grandfather actually was an actual refugee, and all my self-whining over my treatment by the TSA is laid bare as pretty pathetic in comparison. But my great-grandfather did have one advantage over my experience in airport secruity. At least when making his way West from Lithuania, I'm sure my great-grandfather had sturdy boots on his feet and probably even got to keep them on for the entire journey. Ahh, the good old days.