Thang Nguyen 555

Once 18 years living inside the Terminal, he has died as of yesterday.

My daughter and I never forget the scene where he (played by Tom Hanks) prepared his cracker (singular) as if ready for holy communion ( only to be bumped by a hurried passer-by.). Cracker meal, on the floor.

Our transient life viewed via another person’s, a passenger passing through. Earth our terminal.

Iranian revolution in 1979. Iranian revolution this past month. Theocracy or Autocracy. All cried out: set me free. Feed me. See me. Feel me ( The Who ).

I was looking at the chart, how much each performer at Woodstock got paid e.g. Jimmy Hendrix got top dollars (not bad for left-handed soloist. Near the bottom, we saw Santana. Yet the latter has staying power, even after a heat stroke last year.)

Time and terminal. Eternity in the present. Our communion outside of Church in pure unadulterated Ec·cle·si·as·ti·cal sense. Every generation or so, people forget. Then con men, con artists, fixers, false prophets, predictors and profiters would recycle old scripts. Keep blasting it. SEO. Ad sense and Ad words. The age of machine learning and preaching. Us? the choir. Repetition, brain-washing, herd then conformity.

So our Terminal man keeps looking at the Departure board, wishful thinking it into reality. That his eventual turn would be up.

All aboard. Carry-on and Crackers only. Dreams packed in a suitcase. Destination pre-set. You’re the chosen. For this journey.

Be careful who you talk to. Don’t befriend strangers or offer to help with their luggage. No kindness of strangers when traveling.

Born to be man, not mule.

Please allow ample time for unexpected delays or changes in schedule.

The travelers and the terminal. Converged at one moment in time. At times, it makes for history. Any place that allows for loading and unloading of passengers. A train station. An airport, or a cruise-ship yard. Leave your heart and loved ones behind. Only in memory they live on. Memories that creep up without warning. To realign our priorities and prefill our lives with context and continuity.

We are the sum of our memories. Of trips taken. And by extension, of terminals where we stop, just to have a snack, a cracker even.

Occasionally, we bump into someone we recognize. And in that instance, the spatial and contextual history became alive and we feel young (going back in time) and hopefully be whole again by unedited past. What should have been transient at an airport in France, has become dead permanent for a real-life Iranian played by Tom Hanks, whose action and empathy made such an impression and imprint that when I saw the news about his final “departure”, I just want to say: “Have a nice trip.”