Just in case you were wondering, Anne and her folks got back from their big Church history tour last night. I was waiting at the airport to collect them, marvelling at the colossal lack of style shown by most of the people around me. I’m not exactly George Clooney in the sartorial department, but most people these days seem to travel in their gym clothes — sweatpants, sweatshirts, hoodies, t-shirts, wifebeaters, and ball caps. Everything loose-fitting, untucked, often several sizes too big. The look was so common last night that the occasional pair of jeans was remarkable, and the lone gentlemen in a sport coat and tie was downright startling. (He was an older man, of course, old enough to remember when t-shirts were considered to be undergarments only.) Most of the athletic outfits were nondescript and without obvious logos, but then there was the family of gang-banger wannabes that was dressed head-to-toe in Oakland Raiders-wear. An entire family — late-twentysomething mom and dad, a tall boy about ten or twelve and a younger boy, maybe seven or eight years old — garbed in officially-licensed, Raider-branded black-and-gray. Dad wore an expensive-looking leather team jacket; mom had a slightly-less pricey fleece version. And all of them wore those ubiquitous nylon workout pants with the snaps down the sides of the legs. They must’ve spent a small fortune at Fanzz to acquire all that stuff.

I just kept thinking that we’ve come a long, long way from the time when men wore suits and hats and women dresses with white gloves when they went out, and especially when they got on an airplane. I wouldn’t necessarily like to return to such a level of formality, but couldn’t we hit a happy medium? As it is today, most people look like they just rolled out of bed.

[grumpy old man voice] Yeah, in my day, we didn’t have soft, fleecey, snuggly clothes. We wore burlap sacks, even when we were making love. We had tough skin then — and we liked it!! [/grumpy old man]

That was one thing I noticed in Germany when I was there last year: people don’t exactly dress up, but they do seem to pull themselves together a lot more than we slovenly American-types. You’d never mistake a German’s attire for exercise gear or pajamas, and with the exception of the occasional pullover, I didn’t see a single German wearing fleece out in public. (Wool sweaters were much more common.) No sneakers either. You can always tell the Americans when you’re outside the country — they’re the ones wearing white sneakers.

As long as I’m griping anyway, let me say that I was very unimpressed with the post-9/11 inconvenience of having to wait for arriving passengers by the baggage claim. I’ve been to other, newer airports around the country that have spacious lobbies and waiting areas outside the security checkpoints, but Salt Lake International was designed a long time ago, during a more trusting age when anyone could get into the terminals as long as you weren’t packing heat. The philosophy up until 2001 was that family and friends could greet their returning travelers by the gates, as soon as they stepped out of the jetway. This caused a few headaches, too. Once upon a time it seemed like every incoming flight had a couple of Mormon missionaries on board, coming home after their two years of serving the Lord, and the mass of family waiting to welcome them back was sometimes large enough to interfere with other passengers who were trying to get by. But in general it was a far better arrangement then what we have to put up with now.

Now everyone must crowd into a narrow area between the baggage carousels on one side, the security checkpoint ahead of you, the escalators to the parking structure behind you, and the check-in desks to your other side. This area was never intended to be anything more than a foyer, a place to confidently stride through on your way to some other place. Thankfully, most families in Utah have gotten the message that they can’t bring all thirty-seven cousins and Aunt LaVonda to meet their returning missionaries anymore. But I still miss the days when I could savor a cheap airport chili dog and watch the arriving planes through the terminal windows as I waited. I used to do that sometimes even when I wasn’t meeting someone.

Anyhow, Anne and her folks were understandably exhausted after their ten-day run around the east and midwest, and they were also more than a little frazzled after catching their connecting flight in Denver with only minutes to spare. They wanted nothing more than to get back to Anne’s place and sleep the sleep of the dead for a nine or ten hours, so I still haven’t gotten much in the way of stories. I do know that they had a bad experience in St. Louis — let’s just say that reserving a hotel over the Internet, with no real idea of what kind of neighborhood you’re looking at, comes with certain risks — and that Anne doesn’t care if she ever again puts on the one pair of shoes she took with her (white sneakers, oddly enough…)

When I travel, I tend to collect maps, postcards and pamphlets from the places I visit, and Anne has unfortunately picked up my bad habit and expanded on it. She had somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty cards and a Mead school folder stuffed with wads of ephemera. Also, she and her dad, using a digital camera, took some 700 photos. My ten days in Germany last year resulted in a two-volume scrapbook containing (I believe) about 300 photos. I’m guessing that Anne’s looking at three volumes easy, maybe four. God help us when she and I finally manage to take our dream trip to Scotland…

Oh, for the record, while she was gone I made it through eight episodes of Magnum and two feature films — Bring It On and Lost in Translation — on DVD. I also went out to see a movie in a theater once by myself (Fahrenheit 9/11, reviewed here on Simple Tricks.)