A few months ago, my son was invited to attend a lacrosse event in Delray Beach, Florida in December. “Book it,” I said, imagining oceanfront dining, sunset walks, and all the things that defrost Chicagoans’ bones.
Mother Nature had other plans: from the moment we landed, she pelted us with torrential rains, flash floods, dangerous winds, and other coastal hazards.
We decided not to sweat. We watched the waves crash angrily onto the shore between showers. We found a shopping center. We found great pizza. (Anthony's Coal Fired if you're near Boca Raton.) We watched Top Gun, Forrest Gump, and a lot of Friends in our hotel room.
The weather cooperated with the show, which was a full day of my son playing his heart out, and a full day of me once again marveling at how much growing up requires kids to dive into unchartered waters and set themselves up to publicly sink or swim, be accepted or rejected, delighted or disappointed. This means a lot to their hearts. And ours.
Either way, we ended the weekend feeling grateful and happy.
Then we got to the airport to fly home.
We had just reached the beginning of the security line—shoes off, bags on the conveyor belt—when an agent started yelling at everyone to leave the area. The airport was evacuated. Details were sketchy, but we were told to act quickly.
At first we were allowed to wait on the sidewalk right outside the terminal. Then police cars started arriving, lights and sirens came on, and we were ordered to move away from the building. We were eventually ushered to the lower level of baggage claim where we awaited further instructions.
The wait stretched for an hour, then two. The instructions remained minimal. The babies were crying. The mood flared. People were fighting for the few precious outlets to charge our phones and laptops. News about a bomb threat started coming through my phone.
As we approached the third hour of waiting, an excited man came up and asked if he could charge his tablet next to my phone. He explained that he had just arrived in Florida for rehab. This will be his fifth stint. He was desperately trying to get to the facility, but the car that was supposed to pick him up couldn't get to the terminal and his tablet wasn't working, so he couldn't contact anyone.
Together we tracked down the object number. They were really waiting for him. We put the woman helping us on speaker and tried to formulate a plan to get Lyft into a closed airport to pick up a man with no phone, no money, and no working tablet, and I had two thoughts.
My first was Kim White, a woman I met in 2018, whose motherly heart I fell in love with, and who I wrote about on another December day, who lost her son Al to a heroin overdose. She told me that Al checked out of every rehabilitation center she and her husband enrolled him in, and yet they never gave up trying.
“We ended up trying a place in Florida,” she told me, “and our reasoning was, if we send him to Florida and he goes, he'll be fine because it's warm. I mean, as a parent, you think, 'It's warm.' He won't freeze. It's warm there.”
My second thought was what it would be like to see the systems around you crumble and the loss of life in front of you. And feel powerless to do anything about it.
Did I help this person get into rehab? Honestly, I don't know. The woman had just found Lyft when the announcement came that the terminal had reopened and we should return to security. I needed my phone back. We needed to catch a flight. (Our flight ended up leaving without us.) The man described what he was wearing, and the woman assured him that she would tell the driver where and how to find him. I said goodbye and left. I'll probably think about him forever.
Two days later we returned to Chicago and went to school. Jarrett Payton, son of Bears legend Walter Payton, appeared on AM 670's The Score, telling a story from his childhood about how his father took him to Toys R Us four days before Christmas and sent him off with four personal shoppers.
“Money doesn’t matter,” his father told him. “Get whatever you want.”
On the way home, the car packed to capacity, they turned left instead of right, eventually arriving at an apartment complex where Walter Payton knocked on the door, son and toys in tow.
“My dad got a letter from this dad saying he had lost his job and was there any way he could get a signed football for his family because they were big Bears fans and that would take care of Christmas,” Jarrett Payton recalled. “All the toys that I thought were coming back to my home in South Barrington, Illinois, actually went to this family.
“That’s the moment I realized what my passion was,” he continued. “It was giving and serving. Doing things for other people that maybe couldn't do anything for me, but by and large they did. They showed me what it means to love each other and not have a lot but still have each other.”
Something about hearing this story right after a crazy weekend made me shut up. We need resilient systems. We need social safety nets.
And we also need each other. Advocate for these systems and safety nets, and intervene and help when they break down. This isn't a story about me patting myself on the back for it. I'm not sure I did it. This is the story of how I am reminded to always try.
This is how I end this year, and this is how I hope and plan to spend the new one. And maybe, hopefully, some of this resonates with you.
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