scene from an airport

I spent the last few days in the middle of the country, spending time with 5 amazing, wonderful girlfriends. Lots of talking, laughing, crying, drinking (lemonade for me, sigh) - best. week. ever.

Last night, I flew home. The flight didn't leave until 9pm, and I got to the airport unusually early. So I sat in the waiting area, with my Sex & the City 2 edition of Entertainment Weekly, and waited. People came in and out. The gate agents finally got to the desk. All those airport announcements - "will Bob Smith meet his party at the baggage claim," "this is the last call for flight 1264" - floated in the air.

And then I felt it. Either that, or I was having an extreme stomach moment, but I'm pretty sure - I felt movement. All around me, people were texting friends and reading magazines and snipping at the gate agents because they didn't like their seat assignment, and the woman sitting next to me was shooting nasty looks at the kid seated behind her who kept banging against the seat back, and I was feeling this baby move for the first time. Ordinary life just kept going on, and all I wanted to do was grab the microphone from the irritated gate agent calling up standby passengers so I could say it out loud: "I can feel this baby move! Do you people know what a freaking miracle this is? DO YOU?"

I think I've felt it a few more times since then. I had thought maybe I was feeling it over the past few days, but it's so hard to tell - baby, or gas? Trust me, there's plenty of the latter (the romance of pregnancy continues). But this was real. In the middle of the airport. Where nobody cared. And my life was changing, right there, and nobody knew.

Who knows what's happening in any of us when we run into each other on the street, see each other in cars, walk past each other in airports? Who knows when someone's whole life is changing, right then, and you just can't see it?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God, wrote poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Sometimes even the airport.