Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

When the security guy at the Des Moines airport drew a yellow line through Alice’s boarding pass, I knew we were in trouble. I’d promised new airplanes, maybe a long line, but not this. Before I could explain what was happening, she was taken to a penned-in area. An offended murmuring coursed along the line of fellow passengers.

Navigating the airport with a cane was impossible, so she was in a wheelchair with her purse on her lap. She looked baffled when her shoes were removed. I stepped over the barricade so I could talk to her; they ordered me back. The passengers’ murmuring turned into muttering. This is ridiculous. What are they doing to that poor lady?

A woman on the security team grabbed the purse and put it on the magic untouchable table. Now my mother’s bafflement turned to alarm as she watched her purse emptied and a wand stuck inside.

One of the guys mumbled something in her direction about how she’d tried to use an expired driver’s license for ID. Alice couldn’t hear him.

“Talk louder, please,” I called over to him. I wanted to say: Tell her that you think she’s covering up her true identity and is really some other ninety-three year old woman, maybe Bin-Laden’s grandmother. See how absurd you sound talking about an expired driver’s license.

But saying that didn’t seem wise. We were in a new America, after all, and in this new America you had to shut up and be humiliated if that’s what it took to keep you safe.

Besides, I felt guilty. With all the time we’d spent together in Ames packing her belongings, why hadn’t I thought to mention shoes and wands and magic tables?

The woman asked Alice if she could walk. When she said yes, she was ordered to stand up and move out of their way so they could pass the wand over the wheelchair. She was wearing her customary nylon knee-highs and the floor was slippery. I stepped over the barricade to hold on to her. I wasn’t going to watch her fall.

“Hey! Lady!”

I put my arm around my mother’s shoulders and told them that she was more fragile than they thought. They decided they were finished with her anyway. No apologies.

“That was weird,” was all Alice had to say about the incident later in the airport cafe where she drank coffee and hungrily watched people. Her attention turned, as usual, to fashion. “Why are women wearing such long tops these days? Are they trying to cover up their seats?”

On the airplane itself, loaded with Valium, she pronounced the ride as “kind of like sitting in a big room with a lot of noise going on.”

When we got to Portland, we went to Ketzel’s house where we were to spend the night. Ketzel had just finished planting a tree in Alice’s honor. She took her out to the deck to see it. Alice asked what kind it was.

Ketzel teased her. “It actually comes from Norway.”

(It’s really a Chinese Parasol tree.)

And there, sitting on the deck, Alice settled into the cocoon of bliss that is Ketzel’s garden. New tree. New friend. New life.

Alice's tree on right

Ketzel and Alice

New Life