It’s morning, you need to leave for work.  You’re already showered up and dried down.

It’s that moment, that beautiful moment between pulling a shirt over your head and putting on your shoes.

It’s time to get socks.  You open your sock drawer (or in my case, socks/underwear/t-shirts/odds and ends drawer) and are alarmed to see that you are totally out of socks.

Nuts.

No worries, you’ll just pull a decent smelling pair from the dirty laundry.  Right off the bat you find one amazing sock that could easily pass for having just been washed (which may or may not be due to the fact that it had been lying on top of a detergent bottle).  You quickly put it on, dive back into the pile, and pull out another sock.

Sniff…

uuuuuuugggh.

It smells awful… but you’re going to be late… oh well, maybe no one will notice…

And that, folks, has happened to every single person who has ever owned socks… or at least I hope so, otherwise I just have really low standards when it comes to sock cleanliness.

So I’m up at Camp again, and it’s awesome!  Fresh air, sunlight, the absence of automobile exhaust, it’s enough to keep me happy for a long time.

Getting up here was quite the challenge, however, as I had to pick up a counselor coming from France on Friday night.  Initially everything sounded easy: her flight was coming in at 9:10pm, I’d get her, and then we’d head up to camp the following morning.

I received an email from her around noon-ish saying that her flight had been delayed until 10:55pm.  No problem, it’s not that much longer.

I arrived at the airport around 10:30pm and, in order to pass the time, I started walking laps around the terminal, which I timed to take about 2 minutes each.  About six laps in, the video board showing all the incoming flights declared that her flight had been delayed again, this time to 11:10pm.

No biggie.

Once her flight officially landed, I ceased my walk-a-thon and stood front and center at the arrivals gate.  Though I’d never met the girl, her counselor profile had a photo and, with the knowledge of who to look for well in hand, I stood ever vigilant on the lookout for her.

Then two hours passed.

During the course of those two hours, I kept telling myself the same thing: Customs just takes a bit.

Which turned to Customs must take a while, which became Customs must take a long time, which morphed to Customs must take a really long time.

Right around 1am, my brain started putting out a new message: She already arrived, I missed her, and now a girl who’s never been in the United States before and doesn’t speak a whole lot of English is wandering around the airport and we have no methods of communication to locate each other.  

Which turned to $#^%.

I started running around the terminal in a state of panic, staring down any person who even remotely looked like her.  Time after time I came up empty.  Defeated, I walked back to the arrivals gate.

A minute later, she walked right out.

Relief.

There might be a positive lesson here about the virtues of patience, but I think there can be only one takeaway from a practical standpoint:

Customs takes a really really really really really long time.