Sign O' The Times

If I’ve learnt one thing, it’s this: looking for signs is not for the faint of heart. If you’re seeking one, you may not see it at first. Don’t give up. Stay alert, keep your eyes peeled, and eventually it’ll appear. But you may have to take the road less travelled by. 

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72 hours. They told me I had 72 hours to get it right. But this was not really the truth, the whole truth, the unvarnished truth, the one that’s stripped bare of veneers and obfuscations. No. The truth is, you have something like twelve hours. That’s all. 

Here, I’ll explain the math. I can see your eyes are glazing over as soon as I say the word, but never mind, just listen, pay attention, you never know when you’ll be in that situation. When you’re going to need it. First of all you can take out the non business hours -- I see I’m losing you already, and I’ve lost so many people this year, I can’t bear to lose another. First the maid, then the gardener, then the flower girl. That’s three already. So okay. No more math. Just take my word for it. Just twelve hours. That’s all you’ve got. Practically speaking.

The best place was the one at the airport. Of course there were places closer to me. Nearer to home, where I knew the roads, the intersections, the landmarks, where the speed limits were more friendly to me. That is, below the dreaded sixty five miles an hour. But no one vouched for them. They were like the homeless guy come into a bit of good luck, trying to rent a studio on Woodside. No prior references available. That’s what those places near home were like. Maybe there’ll come a time when someone will say, they’ll deliver for you in 24 hours, they’ll have all the magic letters the airline demands, the R and the T, the P, C and the R, all arranged in the right order, lined up like little soldiers fighting in my own battalion, but for right now, they were unknowns.

So this is how I found myself, speeding along at sixty five, looking for a sign. The sign that said, “COVID tests, this way.” The google directions lady tried her best. “Stay straight on Airport Boulevard,” she said. 

(But what is straight? I ask you this, not as a philosophical question, not as the question the homeless guy asked me when he broke into my house and took a silver pitcher saying, “Isn’t my life more important than the fact that your great grandmother left you this pitcher, and therefore my hunger trumps your idea of what it is to be straight,” but as a practical matter of directions. The North, South, East and West of life.)

The boulevard that I was on bifurcated, and then the bifurcations further bifurcated, and then they had progeny, and I found myself swimming in the midst of five lanes. Domestic, International Arrivals, International Departures, If You Want To Go to Brokaw Road, Something Else to Confuse Hapless Souls, these were the lanes, and here I craned my neck left and then far right wondering where the heck the sign for Carbon Health was. 

If I saw the sign, I knew that my trip would be a good idea. Wouldn’t it be the Universe’s way of telling me that it was giving me the go ahead to fly in the time of Delta, and here, I don’t mean the airline, but the variant, the one that grabs you in a matter of seconds and decimates your lungs, mind, kidneys, heart and any organ that can’t resist. That Delta.

I was giving up when I saw the sign. It was off to the side, hanging out in the crook of the elbow formed by domestic and international, the time they parted ways as all separate roads must, sometime or the other. By this time, the sweat had amassed on my forehead, like melted ice atop a mountain, and major rivers were running down the side of my face. Sometimes the gap between where one is and where the sign is, is too great to traverse. It takes more than a hot moment to cross five lanes.

Thankfully there was no limit on how often one can circle around an airport.

I wound my way through the innards, passing Air Canada, United, Delta (this time the airline), Alaska and all the others that work for us to pollute our air. A second chance to find the sign. This time I’ll do it, I said to myself.

Back at the starting line, I sat up straight, put my shoulders back, sucked the oxygen in deep. One lane, I got this, I told myself, then cut over to International. Before I knew it, the friendly two international lanes had split further, spawning strangers I was unacquainted with. I needed another sign, but there was none. I slowed down. I screamed. I asked Fate what it was playing at. Drivers behind me were getting impatient. I heard horns honking and then the people whose time was more precious than my mother's need to see me made their way around me and sped off down roads they knew better than I did.

Third time was not a charm.

As I started the fourth round, I began to ask myself: Was the failure to see the sign a sign? Was I in the Escher painting of signs where the lack of one sign points to another, a ladder that leads you to another ladder? Was this a portent that my trip was doomed, not to be undertaken in this perilous time?

The fourth round was a bust.

Now five has always been my favorite number. It’s got everything: flats, curves, a right angle. It’s not too rigid, and not too flexible. It would be Goldilock’s number, not too this and not too that. So the fifth time I went around, and International split, I stayed on the right. When it birthed a strange little road, I took it. Didn’t Frost talk about the road less travelled by? That came in handy.

Then it was there: the second sign, the one that I had been seeking all along. “COVID test.” Modest, painted white, easily missable, a wallflower of a sign. A sign that's soon forgotten, much like one fails to remember the theft by a homeless guy of a silver pitcher, because he presents an infallible logic, the primacy of his need. What's forgotten goes unreported. Never had that dreaded word, and here I mean COVID, not theft, appeared so fair. I stepped on the gas, a smile lighting up my face, looking forward to white gowns, invasive swabs and finally, a single word with a bad rap, NEGATIVE.