What Would The Tow Guy Do?

As I spent a good chunk of my week in airports, I pondered why the series LAX failed. Perhaps because it focused on the shiny, pretty "struggles" of airport Administrators Blair Underwood and Heather Locklear. It should have focused on the invisible people we never notice. The woman who fled female genital mutilation in Somalia to come here where she now works at Satrbucks, whipping up half-caf no foam vanialla mochas for distracted, impatient travellers. In freedom.

As I was sitting on my flight home today, I wondered about the guy who was driving the tow (buggy? cart? It's not really a truck, is it) that was pushing the plane back from the gate. How long has he or she been pushing planes in and out of gates? Did he have to work his way up from being one of the signal people who guide the planes into the gate? How does she feel about her special place in this world? Why don't planes have a "reverse" gear, that allows them to back up on their own power? Why? Because what would tow gal or guy do then? Unload luggage. That's for Calvinists.

What if the tow guy today was a quiet man, a man of few words who lives alone and pines away for the girl who got away? Who went for the mechanic who had a tatoo of a bomb going off on his tricep because the mechanic keeps the planes from falling from the sky.

And so he has taken up feng shui at home, to get some sort of glued-together peace. He doesn't place the goldfish he bought for wealth and fertility (just in case) in the bedroom or kitchen, because you just don't. He's installed a floodlight in his bathroom, lest he live in dimness and apathetic energy. If he actually had guests and served them tea, he'd definitely know not to point the spout at his guests, because of the hostile energy it projects.

But, he does keep the dead, dried roses in a drawer in his house. He'd sent them to her, and she had sent them back. He knows they represent dead energy. But, he hopes one day they'll come back to life. And, so will the "them."