adventure

I have a 6 AM rule.

If the airport dropoff requires me to wake up before 6, I am operating in dangerous territory. When I am awake, I am awake — but the manner in which I arrive at “awake” matters enormously. I shake the sand out slowly. I need time to build momentum. If that process starts before the sun has any intention of showing up, I will spend the rest of the day staring at walls, losing verbal sparring matches I would normally win, and napping in chairs I had no plans to sit in. I am, essentially, a human screensaver.

My wife has no such limitations. She can wake at 3 AM, drive to the airport, come home, and go back to sleep like none of it happened. I find this both impressive and deeply unfair.

The labor of being the free Uber isn’t actually free, by the way. It’s paid for in brain cells and accidental afternoon naps.

Earlier this year — February, maybe, or early March, the details are fuzzy in the way that only pre-dawn experiences can be — I did a 5 AM dropoff. The wakeup was somewhere around 4:30. I won’t describe the rest of that day except to say I spent most of it trying to goose a single brain cell into firing.

So I updated the policy. One pre-6 AM spousal run per quarter.

This coming Saturday, her flight is at 5 AM. The math on that wakeup is not complicated. She asked me something about the flight options — “5:00 or 1:00?” —, and I thought my preference was obvious. She said, “Oh, they gave me the 5:00 flight.” There I was. A man of principle, staring down his principles.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do about that. A paid Uber is getting my vote, but votes change

Now, the rules are not the same for everyone. I’ve developed what you might call a tiered system. It is not written down anywhere, but it is very real.

Hockey boys know the score. They’ve seen enough early practices to understand that some hours of the day are not meant for human activity. If their flights are reasonable, I’m happy to run them. If they’re leaving at what the military calls 0-dark-thirty, they’re calling an Uber without any hurt feelings on either side. This is an understood arrangement.

Exchange students have, in my experience, been European, and Europeans apparently book flights like reasonable people. Arrivals tend to land in the afternoon. Departures can get a little early, but my wife handles those. She, as previously established, is built for this.

Family is where the policy gets complicated, mostly because family comes with feelings attached to it. There is an ongoing negotiation in our house about whether saving forty dollars on an early flight is worth what it costs in parental sleep and the general goodwill that holds a family together. I have opinions on this. I keep most of them to myself.

The honest truth is that family members (not our kids) who visit us for weddings usually have rental cars. Which means I can say, with complete sincerity, “Too bad you’ve got the rental — I would have been happy to run you.” And I might even mean it. I just don’t have to specify that my happy shuttle service has operating hours, and those hours start at 6.

The OKC airport, for what it’s worth, is a genuinely pleasant experience. Easy drive, easy TSA, more marijuana dispensaries along the route than I remember from DFW but fewer traffic lights, so it probably evens out. The only real drawback is that flights out of here tend to leave early. If you’re connecting through Dallas or Denver to get somewhere real, your day starts at an hour that tests people.

It tests me, anyway.

My wife is fine.

I have lived in Oklahoma for almost a year and a half now, and most days I’m met with a frequent reminder of just how nice people are here. We aren’t just talking “Chick-fil-A” level service; this is something deeper. As a Midwesterner by way of Texas, my critical thinking usually searches for the catch—but in Oklahoma, the “My Pleasure” attitude seems built into the asphalt.

The DFW Gauntlet vs. The OKC Glide

Coming from the northeast side of Fort Worth, I’m used to a certain kind of vehicular combat. To get to DFW Airport, you had to survive a dozen traffic lights, a train crossing, a toll road, and that tangled knot where 820, 121, and 183 all fight for the same patch of dirt. You’d shrug at the chaos and mutter, “What else you got for me, Mr. Highway Engineer?” Up here, the experience is so different that it almost feels unfair.

From our house to the Will Rogers World Airport, we encounter fewer than five traffic lights. In fact, we don’t even see a signal until the terminal is practically in view. This lack of friction invites you to relax. It’s likely why I can’t think of a single roundabout in our part of Oklahoma City; the 4-way stop remains the preferred method for handling the world, one car at a time.

The Great East-West Bottleneck

However, that casual pace is put to the test just north of our house. We live near one of the last major north-south roads before the city peters out, and our local 4-way stop can easily see two dozen cars backed up at once. While the north-south flow is steady, the east-west traffic can become a genuine test of character.

You would think this would breed the “every man for himself” mentality I learned on the Texas tolls. Instead, it seems to build a peculiar kind of patience.

The Two-Fingered Salute

This morning, my wife and I were heading north to church. As we pulled up to that busy 4-way stop, I encountered a driver to my left heading east. While he had no backlog to contend with at this hour, he insisted we go first. He gave me that classic move: the two-fingered wave from the top of the steering wheel. It’s a motion that says, “Get on with it. I can out-wait you.”

I took him up on the offer. Why delay our arrival at church, even by a few seconds, when someone is determined to be more patient than you?

A Deficit of Time, A Surplus of Grace

What made this act of kindness truly remarkable was the timing. This was the first day of Daylight Saving Time—the annual 23-hour day that serves as the bane of most people’s existence.

On a day where every human being in the Central Time Zone is starting with a sixty-minute deficit, this man chose to use up a few more of his precious seconds just to put himself at a further disadvantage. “Out-nicing” another driver is one thing on a standard Sunday, but when you see it happen during the exhaustion of a 23-hour day, you know you’ve found something special.

You must be in Oklahoma.

Walking Down Life's Road With Andy