SHORT-TERM PARKING
The alert that my husband set on my phone to go off when his plane left the gate at JFK pinged. It was go-time.
I already had the car running, warming in the (open) garage at my parents’ house, had counted back from the slated time of the alert: 10 minutes for car-warming, 10 minutes for getting whatever clothes had been jettisoned back onto each child, 10 minutes for peeing and re-clothing, 10 minutes for snacks and un-snacking via spilling/tossing (followed by re-snacking), ten minutes for disasters (can’t find the stuffie, can’t find the children, etc.). Then the ping.
From there, it would be 10 minutes to achieve transfer and buckling into the car (during which time my husband’s plane— by which I mean the plane he was captaining— would hypothetically be taxiing), 35 minutes for the drive to the airport, 5 minutes slosh for construction and wrong turns, and 5 minutes to wake the kids from car-naps and persuade them to take in glucose so they would be capable of anything other than crying (during which time my husband’s plane would hypothetically be in the air and then descending into Hancock International, meeting us with the roar of thrust-reversers in our blaze of timeliness at the corner of the Cell Phone Lot).