November 18, 1996
I've never in my life missed a flight; I have a perfect record of making it to the airport with time to spare. But I was beginning to wonder if that may change as I sat on my trolly of luggage and watched the minutes tick off the big wall clock. The red second hand stabbed at the dash marks; time was pulsing away. Where was John? Shouldn't he be back by now?
11:45. Final luggage check-in was at 12:30. After that we would have to leave our clothes, our toiletries, our Moroccan stone carvings behind in Germany. Come on John, hurry, hurry. I kept going over in my mind the time it would take the train to get him from the airport to the Hauptbahnhof, how long for him to find the U4 underground train, to buy a ticket, watch as four stops reeled by his window. I gave him five minutes to reach the travel agent, another five to grab the flight tickets and run back to the underground train. If he missed the airport connection, he'd have to wait fifteen minutes for the next one - fifteen minutes we didn't have.
All of this last minute running around was because of Andreas. It wasn't his fault directly. He had no way of knowing that he has the same name as another travel agent across town. We'd booked our tickets with Andreas in Weisbaden - hadn't we? We'd tried two travel agents to get the tickets we wanted; one on either side of Frankfurt. When Thomas, a German friend of ours, hung up the phone and said "You're all set." He'd assumed he'd booked with his agent in Weisbaden. But Monday night, when he and John went to get the tickets, they came home empty handed.
"Nobody in Germany announced himself on the phone by his first name unless he knows you," Thomas said. "I guess the other guy's name is Andreas too." So instead of a relaxing morning the day of the flight, we were doing the mad-ticket-agent-dash before we boarded the plane. The first snow fall of the year only slowed things down - trains were delayed.
The travel agent John needed to get to was one connection and six train stops beyond from the airport. He helped me toss the luggage off the train at the airport and then waved good bye as the doors closed. "Don't walk, run," I said. It took me a while to get the luggage to the Northwest terminal (the furthest one from the train - naturally) and just as I was being told at check-in that I had fifteen minutes left until the window closed, another agent informed me that our flight had been cancelled. We'd been re-routed to an earlier fight. "My husband ran to get the tickets in Bornheim," I told the woman. "Is it possible to hold check in open for us? It's really kind of silly. We booked our tickets with the wrong Andreas. And then the train from Mainz was late and the train from the Hauptbanhof only runs every fifteen minutes...and..." In the corner of my eye I spotted a blue jacket. "John," I yelled. I turned back to the woman. "Um, never mind."
We checked our luggage to Detroit, then ran like hell to the boarding gate. I've always silently scowled at those stragglers who board planes when everyone else has already raised their seat backs and replaced their tray tables to their upright positions. When John and I scrambled on board I saw rows of those same looks. "Sorry," I said to them. "It was Andreas, not me. Um, excuse me, my seat is in there. Excuse me. Sorry. Ah, can I just get this bag in here?" We buckled in, slid our bags under the seats in front of us and we were off. I turned to John, "Still haven't missed a flight," I said. "But that was close. Guess it's a good thing that no one wanted to trade your running shoes in Morocco."