Mediterranean Takeout
My family does the winter holidays in Palm Desert at a condo that my mom’s parents have owned forever. As they’ve gotten older the trips have felt increasingly special — we weren’t sure they were going to make the annual pilgrimage from Ohio to California this year. When we’re out there we don’t do a whole lot. We read, play pickleball, wander through the shops at El Paseo, eat massive pastrami sandwiches from Sherman’s, and walk the loop of their golf club. Every year we consider doing something more exciting, and every year we shrug and wonder why we’d do anything else.
My JetBlue flight was scheduled to depart JFK at 5:29pm on Christmas Day. If you’re not careful, air travel will steamroll your spirit and your sense of humanity. In the security line, for example, when an angry TSA officer all but loses her shit over someone trying to take his cellphone through the metal detector. Or, when waiting for your sandwich in a Kafkaesque food court, you notice workers whose job apparently amounts to unpacking cardboard boxes of snacks and then flattening them, which they do with horrific blankness. It’s while waiting for my sandwich that I snap out of my consumerist trance and do that David Foster Wallacian thing of forced self-awareness. “This is water,” I tell myself, and these are people with lives of their own, and the mom who just yanked her kid by his arm is doing her best. Deep breaths. My nose runs. I’m fighting off a cold and struggling to discover untouched surface area on the wet paper towel that I keep pulling out of my pocket. I take solace in the fact that I’ve stashed no fewer than ten luscious Kleenex in a Ziploc baggie in my backpack.
I arrive at the gate and eat my sandwich. It is not good, which hurts for someone who loves sandwiches as much as I do. The mayonnaise is more gelatinous than it should be, and more gray. The bread too thin, the rest of the ingredients flavorless. I take a trip to the bathroom to blow my nose into strategically moistened paper towels (dry ones will destroy your skin). When I return, the flight gets delayed and changes gates. I buy honey-roasted peanuts for $6. I spend $5.50 on a twelve-ounce bottle of apple juice and drink half of it before throwing it away. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a large man rocking back and forth, and I become annoyed at his unwillingness to stand still. Then I realize that he’s holding what must be his mother’s hand and wearing those big noise-isolation headphones, and so it’s pretty clear he’s got some kind of developmental disability, and I immediately feel terrible and judgmental. This is water.
The flight changes gates again right before it’s supposed to depart. This initiates a stampede of anxious Christmas travelers down Terminal 7’s long, narrow passageway. We are a dangerous herd. I accidentally kick the back of a woman’s shoe and she doesn’t even bother turning around — at JFK, mild kicks are SOP. I pass a kid wearing those same noise-isolation headphones and feel an aftershock of remorse before slowing my gait. We round the corner past a Duty Free display of Ketel One Vodka bottles arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. It baffles me that none of them have been stolen or broken. We arrive collectively exhausted and assimilate into our new home, a mess of seats serving four gates simultaneously. I stake out a spot on the floor near a family with a small dog. A woman my age comes over and befriends them because she has the same kind of dog with her. The dogs sniff each other and the humans smile. I am playing backgammon on my phone and feeling envious of their easy camaraderie. We are further delayed. Boarding finally begins at two hours past the scheduled departure time.
Once on board we learn that there’s an issue with the plane. Later, once it’s been fixed, the captain comes on the PA to tell us that his first officer has timed out and so he’s put in a request for a new one. Everyone on board seems to sense in their gut how this is going to end. We sit for an hour. The captain comes on again to tell us to deplane because it’s going to be a while. On my phone I try to book the same flight tomorrow just in case this one gets canceled, but by the time I get to the checkout page all the seats are gone.
Back in the terminal, I post up outside the men’s restroom, with its unlimited supply of wet paper towels, and search for flights in vain on my phone. It’s 9:15pm when we learn that the flight has been canceled, at which point I join the queue for JetBlue customer service.
The paper towel in my pocket from four hours ago is still wet and I try very hard not to think about why. I am reapplying Blistex at an almost manic clip. The young woman currently talking to the agent in front of me asks a question in a stern voice, which elicits an angry response from the agent, which escalates matters further. I happen to think the young woman was behaving respectfully but what do I know. From the passport in her hand and the little I’ve heard of their conversation, I discern that JFK is a layover before her international destination and her next flight has been canceled. She needs a place to stay and it’s in JetBlue’s Passenger Bill of Rights (a real thing, by the way, down to the capitalization) that JetBlue should put her up in a hotel. Clearly there is some fine print somewhere covering JetBlue’s bottomline that this young woman is not privy to, hence the shouting I’m now witnessing. I have the Samaritan urge to tell her she can crash on my couch, but I realize how creepy this would come off so I keep my mouth shut.
The young woman leaves and the line marches forward. She returns fifteen minutes later and skips to the front, making imploring eye contact with me as she does. I give her the nod and she scurries to the next available agent to retry her luck, though this attempt, too, will be unsuccessful. It’s 10:25pm when I finally get to an agent, who in the span of one minute tells me that there are no available flights to Southern California in the next several days, and no, JetBlue cannot book me on another airline, and if I want to ask about refunds or reimbursements I’ll need to call their customer support hotline. I slink away and call a car.
I wake up in the morning to find that my cold has blossomed into what must be, from the razor-dryness of my throat and the pounding congestion in my head, COVID. A rapid test says otherwise. I spend the day spewing algal phlegm into my bathroom sink and bingeing the fourth season of Too Hot To Handle, which I cannot recommend to anyone not battling an illness. My mom books several replacement flights and I cancel them all. I muster the courage to tell my family that I will not be joining them this year. I am too sick, and the flights we’ve booked cost too much, and I saw grandma and grandpa at Thanksgiving and will see them again in April, and so this year it’s just not worth it. I feel very guilty about this decision. I take a long bath and go to sleep at 9pm.
I wake up thirteen hours later feeling significantly better, and my guilt at not joining my family worsens proportionally. I try to book a United flight to LAX but it’s no longer available by the time I click the button. There are no flights to PSP for the next two days.
At five PM I go to the indoor food market a few blocks away in search of vegetables. I find a mediterranean spot and order basically everything: lentil soup, salmon with cucumber and quinoa salad, roasted vegetables, and baklava. The lone chef gets right to work.
Watching this man prepare my dinner is the best thing to happen to me all month. He mixes the quinoa salad fresh in a metal bowl. He cuts a lemon, squeezes it into the salad, and adds salt before tasting it with a clean spoon — more lemon, more salt. Every few minutes he opens the oven to turn the salmon to give it an even crisp. When he takes the roasted vegetables out of the slow cooker, he holds them aloft for a few seconds to let them drain. He spoons four olives into the to-go container. He cuts a wedge from the lemon, rinses it, and then dries it with a paper towel before putting it in with the salad. He transports the salmon from its pan to the container with a clean fish spatula, which he then places in the sink. (Every utensil goes in the sink directly after it has served its purpose.) He picks up the baklava tray, peels back the Saran wrap, removes two pieces, puts them in a container, replaces the Saran wrap, and puts the tray back by the register. Even the soup is doled out with care. Every act is meticulous; at no point does the kitchen deviate from its neutral state. In between salmon rotations he prepares another customer’s meal: chicken kebab on rice with vegetables, falafel pita. The customer grabs the bag of food before it’s ready and you can tell it irks the chef, the fact that something has happened out of turn. I am not the only one mesmerized by this experience. The other customer has been taking pictures of the food, the menus, and even (I think) me waiting for my food. There’s a small Moroccan flag on display at eye level and some kind of Middle Eastern music playing over the speakers, and it’s already dark outside. We are tucked away in the corner of a market on the day after Christmas, and a man is preparing dinner for a stranger with a level of care that either no one deserves or everyone does.
In my current state — sick, exhausted from trash TV and the worst of the Internet — this interaction seems unfathomably distant from the experience of modern air travel, where the airline is never accountable, and where buying a turkey sandwich involves ordering from a tablet and then carrying your receipt to a pay station where the workers are behind plexiglass, and where no traveler in the hour of my JetBlue customer service ordeal walks away any better off than they were, and where one woman actually has a meltdown in front of everyone and pleads to the JetBlue staff, “It’s a lot of money for me,” and where getting refunds involves navigating a byzantine series of glitchy online forms, useless chatbots, and defensive customer service agents, one of whom will try to get me to settle for future travel credit (which expires) instead of actual U.S. currency, et cetera. Point being: being a consumer is frequently awful, especially if you have to fly JetBlue on Christmas Day, and this is a fact of modern life, and often the best way to cope with this kind of minor atrocity is to ignore it altogether. What is also a fact, however, is that every day there are people carrying out their trades with a level of dignity and service that will absolutely startle you if you’re paying attention.
When I got home from the market I took my dinner out of its plastic containers and plated it properly. I reheated the lentil soup and set the table with real cutlery. I poured sparkling water into a glass and placed a folded napkin under my fork. I turned on a jazz album and put my phone away. And then I picked up the lemon wedge, dry to the touch, and squeezed it over my salmon, because a meal prepared with care and attention deserves to be eaten the same way.
