Sunday Morning Hot Tea - No. 51
That Time I Got Busted by the TSA for Bringing a Weapon to the Airport
Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I (try to) send you something to read each week.
Greetings from sunny Philadelphia, PA! We wrapped up leg 3 of the Sinisterhood tour this week with shows in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Thanks to everyone who came to see us! We had a great time performing for you all.
This week, I bring you a tale from the road when I got stopped by airport security with a knife. Oops! It’s particularly appropriate because it is Father’s Day, and this has to do with my Dad. Just a heads up if Dad stuff isn’t your thing.
A Sense of Security
I pulled a knife out of my mailbox this week. To be clear, it wasn’t a threat. I was expecting this knife. It came in a white padded envelope all the way from Huntersville, North Carolina. A woman named McKenzie texted me earlier in the week to tell me that my knife was on its way. When I found it days later, there in my mailbox alongside some bills and junk mail, I pulled it out and ripped open the package. Sliding it out of the bubble wrap and into my hand, I read the side of the blade. Never having considered it before, I Googled the words pressed into the metal.
Turns out it is a Western Cutlery Premium 3-Blade Folding Pocketknife Knife, Model W742, manufactured circa 1986. Considered a collectible on some websites, it is no longer in production and only available via auction or resale, going for around $60, when one comes available.
I don’t think of myself as a knife person. I don’t generally carry anything that could be considered a weapon, unless you consider the 8 to 14 pens that I have in my purse any given time. It would be a lot of pressure to remember I was carrying around something dangerous all the time. I lose my keys, wallet, and phone enough. I would never trust myself to keep track of a weapon.
A few weeks, ago Christie and I went to Knoxville, Tennessee on business. At the Knoxville airport, the line to get to the ID checkpoint snakes back and forth, guided by stanchions and retractable belts. On top of each pole, the local crew has framed pages of printer paper. Each sheet has the Transportation Security Administration logo printed up top, then down below, there is an amateur photo depicting a gun on a table. The photographs aren’t well lit. They’re barely in focus, likely taken in the office just beyond a nearby door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Beneath the photo of the unloaded weapon, they have printed the caption: "Officer Kilgore prevented this GUN from getting on a recent flight." Underneath is the date of the avoided disaster: just three months before we were there. As we wound through the queue, I saw the same sign again down the line. Getting closer, I realized that it was, in fact, a different photo of a different gun with a different officer's name and a different flight date. Then I saw another sign and another.
I had no idea how many guns tried boarding airplanes. How many people have tried carrying their Rugers and Glocks through a federal security checkpoint?
I asked the question out loud to Christie.
"You tried to bring a knife on a plane," she said. “Recently.”
She was right. Two weeks before that, she and I were setting off with LeeAnn for the first leg of our summer tour when I got stopped trying to sneak a knife through security.
It was quite a scene: 9:00AM on a Tuesday at Terminal C in DFW Airport. Usually, I consider myself to be an expert traveler, but not this day.
In my over-confidence, I am first through the security line and watch as they pull my purple backpack aside from the rubber belt.
We stand at the end of the conveyor belt where we can see the agent standing behind the x-ray with his hands on my bag. He is meaty and self-assured. He is a man of probably 50, his thick neck and dark skin poking up from his collar. He is stern, but in a way that tells me he has kids and is everyone’s favorite dad on the block.
“Whose purple purse?” he asks. I pop my hand in the air, smiling.
“You have a knife in there,” he says, the I’m not mad I’m just disappointed implied.
My eyes bulge.
“Oh my god,” I say, remembering. “I do have a knife in there.”
“A knife? What are you expecting on this trip?” Christie asks. LeeAnn is laughing.
“We just went camping at Big Bend for our honeymoon,” I say, words spilling out.
“We just have to find it,” the TSA agent says and walks back to his post at the scanning machine.
No need to search for it. I know exactly where it is. It’s in the front pocket’s inner pocket, down deep in there so I don’t hurt myself. I know because I put it there a few weeks ago when packing.
“Which knife is it?” LeeAnn asks. It’s a gut punch of a question.
“My dad’s,” I say.
“Oh no,” Christie says.
“Or maybe not,” I say, beginning the process of trying to convince myself I’ll be ok if the TSA throws it away.
After rifling through a few more bags, the young TSA cadet on the bag checking table takes mine from his supervisor.
“Step over here please,” he says to me, pointing to the opposite side of the metal exam table. Christie and LeeAnn follow, looking over my shoulder.
The young agent paws through my things, opening each compartment and pulling out my items in turn. A Kind bar. A pack of Lysol wipes. A fist full of pens. My notebook. He shoves his hand in deep, cavity searching each pouch.
“It’s in here somewhere,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “Do you need my help?”
He nods. I point him to the spot. He finds the knife and holds it up to me.
“This it?”
My stomach hurts. It is my dad’s. I remember where I got it exactly. After he died, I took it from the top of his dresser. That is where he kept lots of important stuff. Like other weapons my dad owned, he never used the knife and possibly didn’t know how. But somehow having it made him feel safe. And me having it with me made me feel safer. It’s why I packed it for the wilderness of West Texas. And, now, seeing it in the TSA agent’s hands with a trashcan nearby makes me panic.
We lock eyes. He has a kind little face with just a bit of scruff on his chin. He’s deeply tan with big, soft eyes. He could be the TSA agent character in a Village People-style boy band. He sees my face and notices my eyes getting a little wet.
“It’s ok,” he says. “Don’t worry. You can mail it to yourself. You just have to go back through security.”
I look at Christie and LeeAnn. They don’t need to say anything. They’re already telling me You definitely have to do that with just their expressions.
“Your friends can hold your bags,” he says. “I’ll walk you right over there.”
Christie and LeeAnn take my suitcase and now-ransacked backpack. The TSA agent walks me back to the entrance. There’s a tan metal container, offering me to “MAIL IT HOME.” It says, “Take a form. Fill it out completely.” I call over my shoulder, “What form?” but he’s already gone.
I dig around the container and find a blue zipper bag with a triplicate stack inside reading SHIPPING FORM.
I pat my pockets and look in my small clutch bag that I kept with me. For once in my life, I don’t have a pen. I slip the knife into the thick blue Ziplock. Beside the checkpoint, I see the American Airlines desk. A woman in a tan cardigan stands watch over the self-tag stations.
“Do you have a pen?” I ask, walking toward her.
“Sure,” she says. She gives me a ball point that falls apart right away. Still, I use the inkstick and manage to fill out the form, pushing hard to ensure it goes through all the layers. The first question after the date is “Item Description/Brand.” I don’t know the brand. I couldn’t even tell you where he got the thing. But I know where I had gotten it – from him.
With dad being gone, and big things happening in life, I try to find small ways to keep him with me, to find some tangible form of his presence and hang on. A talisman to bring him forth when I need some comfort from him.
This knife is one of those. It’s not particularly fancy. It’s not a gadget or a switch blade. It’s just an average knife with a brown handle that I’ve imbued with the magical thinking that somehow this provides me with, not just any protection, but his protection. It’s silly really. At the end of the day, it’s just a knife, but when we lose people, especially people so giant in our lives, it’s ok to have little souvenirs that let us feel like they’re with us.
My dad loved me so big with his whole heart. He told me all the time just how proud he was of me and how much he loved me. He also loved making jokes and making people laugh. He loved people-watching, especially when people were behaving irrationally. He loved eavesdropping on strange conversations, always raising his eyebrows in a silent response. Any time I need a reminder or to feel closer to him when he’s so far away, it’s easy to grab onto something tangible to remind me to laugh at little things like small ironies and people acting bizarre.
Of course, this is all too long to include on the form, so I just write “knife.”
The form asks for my name and address. Below that is a space for my credit card information. I am to pay a ransom of $15.95 plus postage and handling if I ever want to see my weapon again.
A male American Airlines employee walks up to me from behind the counter I’m writing on.
“Is someone helping you?” he asks.
“Yes, sorry, I just needed a pen for this,” I say, holding up the bag and form.
“Oooh,” he says. “How much are they charging for that these days?”
“$15.95, plus shipping and handling,” I tell him.
“All so you can get your item back in, what? Six months?”
I read from the form: “Typically three to four weeks.”
The woman who had given me the pen is listening.
“It’s better than throwing it away,” she says. The man nods.
“I guess you want to keep it, huh?” he asks.
“It was my dad’s,” I say. He presses his lips together at my use of the past tense and because my voice broke when I said it.
I rip the bottom yellow copy for myself and slip the top copies in the bag. Before getting back in the security line, I drop it into the metal mailbox and stuff the yellow sheet into my purse. Rather than the main security line, I step into the one marked “PRIORITY – FIRST CLASS,” despite being neither of those things. I am melancholy, but I’m also not about to wait in the now-much longer line. I’ve done my time.
The agent checking IDs recognizes me from before. Once we place our things on the belt, the man in front of me demands that, despite the fact that we are in a general boarding security lane, he is Pre-Check, and he will not be taking off his shoes. I am Pre-Check, too, but I never thought to demand any special treatment until hearing him.
“I am, too,” I say, glomming onto his entitlement. The agents say it’s fine and check our boarding passes for the little green check. I place my small clutch purse on the belt and walk through the metal detector. The agent who found the knife earlier meets my eyes.
“Did you get to mail it?” he asks. I nod. “Important to you?” he asks.
“Yep,” I say, repeating what I’d said to the American Airlines agent. “It was my dad’s.”
He smiles.
“You kept the yellow copy, right?” he asks. I nod again.
Standing there, biting the insides of my cheeks, I am trying to figure out why I want to start crying at that question. He sees my eyes well up.
“You’ll get it back in no time,” he says, his eyes already back on the X-Ray screen. “Safe travels.”
Not wanting to look like a complete lunatic in the security line, I bite my tongue harder and stop the tears. I look beyond the line and see Christie and LeeAnn waiting for me. These two people love me more than almost anybody. I could cry right there. I could collapse in their arms. I could tell them what I am feeling.
Instead, I steel my face and give them a princess-on-a-parade-float wave with my cupped hand. Christie returns the wave in kind, and LeeAnn nods, smiling.
When I approach, they’re discussing a major news story Christie and I have been following.
“How’d it go?” Christie asks.
“Fine,” I say. “Cost me like twenty bucks, but I’ll get it in like four weeks.”
“Damn,” she says
I pull my glasses out of my backpack and slip them on my face to hide the little bit of wetness that has started in my eyes. Later, I will ask LeeAnn if she noticed that I was crying, and she’ll say no, adding, “But thanks a lot for hiding your sadness from us.”
But it wasn’t sadness. It was humility and gratitude and longing. Even though my dad is gone, he’s still protecting me. We fly a lot for work, and the attitudes of the TSA agents – like all professions – run the gamut from kind to tyrannical. I got the kind ones this day. I got the understanding ones. Maybe it was random, just dumb luck. Or maybe it was because I was carrying my dad’s trusty knife.
A few weeks later, going through security at DFW airport yet again, I was confident that I had emptied my bag of all weapons.
There were two ID-check lines – one for TSA Pre-Check and the other for everybody else. The everybody-else line was the same old, same old. You walk up, give them your ID, the agent looks at your face as you scan your boarding pass, you move along.
The Pre-Check line was different. It had a tablet set up with a camera on top. In that line, you were to hand your ID to the employee who scanned it behind the desk. You then stared into a small camera, about the size of a Ring doorbell, as it scanned your face.
"Do I need to remove my glasses?" one man asked.
"No, it'll recognize you either way," the agent replied.
It seems now, rather than humans matching our faces to our IDs, we may have face scanners doing it.
Christie and I found ourselves positioned in front of a pair of real patriots. Though they did not know each other and were not traveling together, they had teamed up to interrogate the TSA agent about this new system.
The patriotic duo had gone through the Pre-Check line and stood before the cameras; their faces were scanned. The agent who was manning the face scanner moved with them from that station to the disassembly line where we slipped our laptops and shoes and sweaters into bins.
"Is that face scanner new?" the woman of the pair asked, pushing her strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. The agent said yes, it was new, a pilot program rolling out at select airports across the country.
I put my bag on the belt. Without dad’s knife inside, I watched it go through with no issues.
"Can we opt out of that face scanning business?" the man behind us asked. The agent said he could.
"You didn't let me opt out," the woman shot back.
"You didn't ask," the agent said, scooting bins down the rollers toward the scanner.
The pair behind us wasn’t finished protesting. Irked, the blonde woman turned to her fellow freedom fighter and sighed big.
"Now they have our faces!" she said, putting an iPad and iPhone into the bin.
I shook my head and stifled a laugh. Despite my efforts, I could feel my face curl into a smile, the same smile I had seen on my dad’s face a million times before. His knife in a Ziplock bag somewhere far across the country, it didn’t matter. There, in that moment, listening to those people freak out so early in the morning, I knew he was with me, and I knew he was laughing.
***
Until next week, that’s the tea, and on tour with Sinisterhood is where I’ll mostly be.
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