On Language — An Airport Adventure

by Suzanne Poor

I like to arrange flowers and although I’ve never taken any courses in the art, I’ve read a couple pages in a few books. It just seems to come naturally — where to place the long stems, where to cut short and what accents to include. The results are indeed captivating. Once last year, when Patricia Tesman was beginning to falter, I created a bouquet and left it with the concierge at her condo. About half an hour later the phone rang; it was Pat. She said, “I get flowers from so many people, but this was the best arrangement ever. Thank you so much.” Two weeks later, she was hospitalized for the last time. Flowers were on the table by her bed.

Rather than use foam or magic, I prefer what in the trade are called “frogs.” I’d promised my daughter I’d arrange flowers for her housewarming party a few weeks later, but when I went searching for them, there were no frogs in Montclair or anywhere in northern N.J. So I improvised with sponges. However, shortly after the party, we went to a convention in Charlotte, N.C., a relocated New York City, a metropolis of over 500,000.

I’ve traveled to Charlotte at least five times in the past two decades for weddings and funerals in the suburbs but never for a convention in the middle of downtown. I was apprehensive. Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina, one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. It is also the second-largest banking center in the country with Wachovia and Bank of America plus nearly ten more local institutions among them. The city rises tall with steel and glass monoliths reaching to the heavens.
Taxes are low, the streets are clean, the profitability tremendous. In all of downtown Charlotte, we saw no parks, no streams, no frogs. To escape one afternoon, we drove out to the David Stowe Botanical Garden, where, in the gift shop, we saw dozens of frogs — big frogs, little frogs, tiny frogs, round, oblong, square. We snatched up several. And then we left the majestic Queen City, named after George III’s wife Charlotte Mecklenburg.

We packed the frogs in the carry on-luggage because we knew they would raise flags with their sharp prongs and the strangeness of them. And we didn’t want the airport authorities riffling through the checked bag with all my new clothes. But guess what?
The flags few up and three uniformed security guards quietly approached. The head honcho was named John. A short, middle-aged man, he pulled the frogs from my bag, demanding to know their purpose. “Flower arranging,” I said meekly. John replied that they had a dual purpose; they were weapons and posed a threat. It didn’t matter that he’d never heard of flower arranging equipment called frogs, it was the secondary purpose that alarmed the security people. So away John and I went to the Continental check-in desk, passing queues that were getting longer and longer.

The attendant, who was missing one of his eyeteeth, smiled broadly and sweetly nonetheless, informing me that the frogs would have to fly home in the belly of the plane — in my luggage. He called the baggage people, who set aside my checked bag and sent the frogs, protected in bubble wrap and their own gray plastic container, down the chute to the loading dock.

On the way back, John said, “We don’t usually escort passengers on these kinds of journeys to transfer lethal items to passengers’ checked baggage, but for you . . . .”

I don’t know if it was because of my being so attractive — a new theory has it that pretty people are more successful — or because he was totally flummoxed by the idea of “frogs” with sharp points or that flower arranging depended on a deadly weapon for its own beauty.

With the frogs on the beltway, John escorted me back, past the lines at the x-ray machine. Whisked through, I wondered if I’d ever see the round green metal things with inch-long points sticking straight up or if they’d turned into princes and enchanted the entire Charlotte airport.

When we arrived back in Newark and retrieved our luggage, there they were, right on top, threatening no one, reaching for les fleurs. Airports probably will never permit frogs in carry-on bags, but at least we don’t have to fret about losing our scissors anymore.

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