An SCR Christmas Miracle

Hullo dere. 

There is little of film­mak­ing import to report. I choose to hon­or a New Year’s Resolution early, and not call some kind of ref­er­en­dum on a hir­ing at the L.A. Weekly. At least not here. (‘Twas men­tioned in my Christmas Topics, at The Auteurs’.) I haven’t seen Sherlock Holmes yet. I did see Up In The Air, which I enjoyed up to a point, but not to the point where it would com­pel me to alter my year’s best list. To tell the truth, I find the wildly diver­gent per­spect­ives on the film that I’ve seen out there more inter­est­ing than the film itself. I am also curi­ous as to the iden­tity of Vera Farmiga’s dorsal double. 

Truth to tell, the most inter­est­ing thing I’ve got is a travel tale. It begins, in O. Henry fash­ion, with My Lovely Wife buy­ing a Christmas present for her dad. The present is a very nifty mous­tache razor from The Art of Shaving, and a box of the tiny, tri­an­gu­lar blades said razor accepts. 

On the morn­ing of the 23^rd, Claire and I got up well before the crack of dawn, drag­ging down our suit­cases in a slightly nervous daze, and tak­ing the nice black cor­por­ate car to Newark Airport. Our extremely soli­cit­ous and attent­ive drive  —who was so soli­cit­ous and attent­ive that I did­n’t even mind the fact that he named his own tip on the pay­ment voucher—came chas­ing after us as we dragged our suit­cases into the Continental ter­min­al at Newark.“Excuse me, is this yours?” he asked, hold­ing up the tiny box that held those tri­an­gu­lar razors.

And indeed, it was ours. The ques­tion was, how did it escape from Claire’s suit­case? The answer, alas, was easy enough: the zip­per at the front of her for­mid­able Samsonite case had slipped off of its track, and now its entire front pan­el was about to flap wide open. 

It was about ten minutes after six in the morn­ing. We had an 8:30 a.m. flight. For a few minutes we both crouched in the foy­er of the ter­min­al, examin­ing the zip­per. I am not ter­ribly handy this way, but could imme­di­ately detect that the zip­per was sewn into the front pan­el in such a way that the groove in which either head of the zip­per could “catch” was not imme­di­ately accessible. 

We tried not to pan­ic, but it was not a happy time. We con­sidered options. One of us could check in, go through a gate, find a lug­gage store, buy a new bag, and then return to the check-in area with it, and re-pack. This seemed pos­sible, maybe, but there were a lot of “ifs” involve, includ­ing the rather cru­cial if con­cern­ing air­port lug­gage vendors and their store hours. 

For whatever reas­on we decided to rely on hope and faith, or at least in the prin­ciple of stag­ger­ing our feel­ings of exist­en­tial impot­ence. “Let’s just get on the check-in line, bring the bags to the counter, and see if the attend­ant has some duct tape or some­thing, and we can tape the bag up suf­fi­ciently to check it in.” All right then. So we did, but the wait on the rel­at­ively short line was rather fraught, with Claire in par­tic­u­lar express­ing a large-scale frus­tra­tion with the vicis­situdes of any sort of travel. Once we got to the counter, some nerve-wracking mis­com­mu­nic­a­tions (is this a self-service kiosk?) flared up, none long enough to res­ult in a Planes, Trains And Automobiles freak­out. Eventually we were greeted by a hefty young woman with a thick West Indian accent who seemed to not be hav­ing it from us, and ask­ing us to wait while “someone” “found” some tape. Things did not look promising.

Then the young woman took a look at Claire’s bag and its sorry state, and asked, “Do you have any kind of sharp object?” I know, trick ques­tion, right? “Sure, here’s my box cut­ter…” But as it hap­pens, we did have a sharp object—ten of them, in fact, in that tiny little box that com­prised a por­tion of my father-in-law’s Christmas present. The young woman pro­posed cut­ting the seam of the zip­per so as to pull out the end, and re-attach the zip­per head to its groove. As much as we deplored viol­at­ing a por­tion of the gift, it would seem that this had to be done. With the assist­ance of anoth­er Continental work­er, our new friend made the cut and repaired the zip­per. Then, as if by magic, a role of duct tape appeared, which we wrapped around the por­tion of the case where the cut had been made. We crossed our fin­gers and said a little pray­er that the repair would hold for the flight to KC. It did. And my father-in-law did­n’t mind at all that his mous­tache razor came with nine blades instead of ten.

I tell this story to counter the ste­reo­type of the air­line employ­ee as rude, robot­ic, ter­min­ally unhelp­ful drone. This Continental employ­ee was some­thing of a mir­acle work­er, and we hope she had a great Christmas.