depressing airport scene

Once in a while, I would stop reading a story with a few more pages still to go before the end so that I can prolong the experience while waiting for the perfect time to enjoy the ending. This was my experience reading Charles Baxter’s “The Cures of Love” from his collection Believers. The following passage is brilliant.

A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raise their voices and make demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer.

Baxter succeeds in capturing exactly what I see in a lot of men. The cement metaphor is dead-on. The grayness resembles the depressing corridors of many airports in the US. He continues this lashing-out while keeping as objective a distance as possible.

His wingtip shoes were scuffed, and his suit was tailored one size too small for him so that it bulged at the waist. He had combed strands of hair across his sizable bald spot. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his nose sported broken capillaries. He was not so first class.

I say I love this city but too often I want to thump the people here. Their thoughtless actions make me tired. I love this city, but I hate it too. This strange mixture of love and hate is, altogether, a kind of love. You wouldn’t hate it if you don’t care about it. The scariest thing that can happen in a society is if we condition our children to be indifferent.