Lines that are far too long. No shoes. Laptops out. Phones as well.
Canes can be delivered to the other side but must go through TSA inspection.
This is not about me.
I know this because once it was. Jewelry sewn into secret pockets. Gold coins taped into a thermos bottle. The thermos holding my toddler’s milk, milk that I poured as an Islamic guard pawed through my underwear. It was 1981. Iran. During a war no one remembers.
I prefer being wheeled to my gate, but I am too well and too honest to say otherwise. Good girls don’t tell fibs, my mother used to say. And I was a good girl. Am.
But how does an honest woman smuggle her way out of a country? She tells herself it is the truth, that she has nothing to hide.
Not the sapphire necklace sewn into the watch pocket of her overalls, or the money meant to help sustain her once she reaches the States, because nothing over five hundred dollars is allowed.
But the somber guards, both men and women, found nothing. As TSA finds nothing today. Though today, I am honestly good. What have I to hide? Fifty years and wounds that have not healed.
I lean on my cane and line up to board the plane with the other passengers, only to be stopped, briefly, by an agent who tells me that because I am disabled, I could have boarded first.