Stuck at the airport

Impressionism on an airport floor
Toronto, ON
February 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The scene: Sunday, 9:30 p.m. in Terminal 1, Pier F, at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Our plane should have been in the air well over an hour ago, but here we still sit, waiting for Air Canada to fix a busted 767. As strangers around me grumble at another seemingly boneheaded move by our national airline, I find myself at a fork in the road: Either join in the whine-fest, or walk away.

I choose the latter, as I just don't have the bandwidth to deal with negativity. I can't change the outcome, anyway. Can't fix our jet, or magically summon another. Or get us there any faster. Frankly, considering the complexity, safety, and affordability of flight, it's a wonder delays like this don't happen more often. I'm thankful that sitting on my duff for an extra few hours represents the biggest challenge I've faced all day.

On the plus side, I'm in Pearson's newest terminal. The ceilings soar and the floors gleam, and I've been making mental notes since I first walked in here, Post-Its for photos I want to take later.

Well, later is now. So I stroll the corridors alone, and when I get to this spot, I shift left, then right, then back, and again in a bit of a circle, to find the right angle, the right kind of reflection. The metering is a bit of a challenge, but eventually I figure it out. One airport employee stops to watch. I pretend not to notice, but I smile inside as I see her out of the corner of my eye.

I don't know how many visitors have walked past this very spot and ignored the abstract/impressionist reflections beaming out of the store at the other end of the corridor. But it's not my place to count. All I care about is taking a could-have-been-lost moment and making it memorable. I'm guessing mission accomplished, but I expect other similar moments to present themselves before long. Because the flip side of a delay is having a little more time to breathe.

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