Ocean Breathes Salty

I feel compelled to tell you a story that didn't happen to me.  Reyna might write about it, but I don't think there's a lot of overlap in our respective blog audiences.  I'm certain that my details will be inaccurate, so we'll call this fiction, but the central action of the story actually happened.  Here we go.


Imagine that you're sitting at an airport gate waiting for your flight to board.  It's been a long day of travelling.  This is the final leg of the trip after, not one, but two eight hour layovers.  One in Athens, Greece and one here in Bangkok.  All in all, it's been a thirty-plus hour day of flying and you feel like you might be coming down with a cold.  Morale is rather low, and you just want to crawl into bed and sleep for 14 hours before you have to get up and go to work tomorrow.  Only a two hour flight and a thirty minute taxi ride stand in your way.  Also, once you're on the flight, you'll be away from the mother and her chubby 4-ish year old child sitting next to you at the gate.  The kid has been messily chomping on a bag of potato chips, talking with his mouth open, spraying chip crumbs around the seating area, licking his greasy fingers and whining at his mother since they unfortunately sat down next to you.

People are starting to stand and mill around the flight attendant desk, like they do when a flight is preparing to board.  You check around to make sure you have your belongings policed and ticket prepared for scanning or ripping while you wait for your zone number to be called.  Just then you hear the child redouble his whining to his mother.  Even though they aren't speaking English, you can tell what the child is trying to say.  The language of a child needing to pee is pretty much universal.  The translation aided by the child, who is standing on the seat adjacent to yours holding his crotch as he bends and whines.  You can see that Mom is doing mental time calculations as the scene unfolds.  This is the moment where you begin to regret the fact that you hold a coach ticket.

The mother digs in the seat next to her and retrieves the recently emptied chip bag.  You feel a fear that what was once a benign, if noisy, chip bag destined for the nearest trashcan upon rising to board is now being prepped for a new purpose.  You hear the foil crinkle as she un-crumples the bag and sticks her hand in to open the top as wide as possible.  She holds it in front of the child, still standing on the adjacent seat, who pulls his pants down to his ankles and proceeds to piss in the bag.

At the gate.

Of an international airport.

In the capitol of Thailand.

You hear the pitter-patter on the foil packaging as it accepts its new cargo and cringe in your seat.  You try to block from your mind the thought that a child's bare ass hovers less than a foot from your face.  If he was startled by gunfire or one of those beeping people movers and suddenly turned, your eye or ear could be in the line of fire.  The mother wears a focused look as she attempts to minimize the splash-back, but otherwise appears perfectly placid --a mild look on her face.  This is perfectly normal.

When the boy finishes his business, Mom carefully folds the bag over neatly to keep the contents from spilling.  She then walks over to the garbage can and chucks the bag in.  When she returns, she takes the child's hand and goes to wait in the boarding line, leaving you with a new experience and a story.


Here are the questions I asked, in order, after Reyna told me this story.

"Was it a Big Grab* bag of chips?"  Apparently it wasn't. It was one of those tiny bags of chips like they hand out in elementary schools; or the one that comes in your office boxed lunch and contains about six chips.  You have to admire the conviction of the mother on this point.  She had the stones to hold a vessel that was potentially too small to perform this new and unintended function.

*Is it just me or is the Big Grab in the US now what was once a "normal" sized bag of chips?  Am I crazy on this one?  I remember in high school a Big Grab would pretty much max out my chip threshold.  Now it's like a warm-up.  I swear they've gotten smaller.  Or... maybe I've gotten bigger.  I suppose that's possible too.

"What kind of chips were in the bag?"  I'm not sure why I needed to know this information.  It seemed relevant at the time.  For some reason, it seems funnier with Fritos, or Funyuns.  I'm not sure why.

"Did anyone say anything?" No.  No one said a word to mother or child.  I spend a fair amount of time in airports, but not loads, so I can't speak with much authority on the subject, but I've never seen this before.  I have a hard time believing that this is a behavior that people assimilate.  I've gotten used to a lot of weird shit since moving to Aisa, but a child pissing in a potato chip bag at an airport gate is not one of them.  I suppose there's nothing you can really do about it.  I mean, by the time you realize what's going on, it's really too late to stop it.  The last thing you want to do is interrupt a peeing child.  That's just begging to have your day, shoes, or pants-suit ruined.

"Did any spill?"  Sadly and somewhat inexplicably, Reyna didn't stick around long enough to inspect the area.  I can't imagine any child has the aim to hit an opening that small.  But I didn't ask about the particulars of the way the bag was being held.  I choose to believe that the mom held the bat at the bottom and the child cut loose.