I was on my way back to Indiana from a family gathering in Maryland. She was headed home to Texas after checking in on children and grandchildren.
She was a friendly sort, the kind likely to adopt strays and strangers. She’d begun the conversation by offering to clear some space so I could charge my cell phone in the outlet near her seat.
She was hungry for conversation. Her trip home had been delayed again and again by flight cancellations. She’d spent hours with nothing but her phone for entertainment and distraction.
I commiserated. I’ve seen more than a few hours of my life tick away at airport gates while I was trying to figure out how to get from one place to another.
I told her that I was a little surprised that there weren’t more flight disruptions, given that we’d commenced active war with a nation inclined toward terrorist acts.
She grew silent.
“I just think it’s all going to work out,” she said. “It has to.”
Something about her tone told me not to question or argue. She wasn’t blithely contending that things would be all right. She was praying that everything would be OK because she needed it all to be OK.
There was a reason for that.
She has several grandsons in the military, including one who just enlisted in the U.S. Navy. She was proud of them—proud that they wanted to serve their country, proud that they had summoned the discipline to commit to a cause larger than simple self-interest.
Hers had not been an easy life.
She’d lost a child during the pandemic. She’d had to provide support, emotional and otherwise, to other children and grandchildren through assorted life trials and challenges.
Now, she was proud of her grandsons who are in uniform, but she also was worried about them, even frightened for them.
That’s why things had to work out.
I didn’t ask her, but I presumed she voted for President Donald Trump in the last election. Every now and then, a MAGA allusion would find its way to her conversation.
But again, the tone—more wistful than certain—was telling.
She asked me how I thought the war with Iran was going to go.
“My heart wants you to be right,“ I said, “but my head says otherwise.”
I was going to add that for all the norms of American political conduct Trump defies or ignores, in one way he’s acted like too many other presidents in our history. They, too, thought that once they had unleashed the dogs of war, it would be easy to pen them up again.
Inevitably, they learned—to their regret and to others’ grief—that wars are much, much harder to finish than they are to start. And they are almost impossible to contain.
But I didn’t say that.
Instead, I looked at the face of an old woman who was also a kind woman and a good woman. I saw the concern on her face—the desire for everything to be OK.
The need for it all to work out.
Because she has grandsons to worry about.
So, I left my response at that single sentence.
She didn’t want a debate. She wanted reassurance. She wanted a guarantee that her grandsons were going to be safe.
And I couldn’t provide that.
A moment or two later, I told her I was going to have dinner before my flight.
“I do hope you’re right,” I told her as I unplugged my phone and packed the cord away. “And please thank your grandsons for me for their service.”
As I sat down for my meal, I thought about her and her grandsons—and all the other grandmothers and grandchildren in her situation. Too many presidents—including this one—have been too cavalier about putting in harm’s way young people who have offered years of their lives to serving this nation.
The fact that the president hadn’t even attempted to rally the nation to this fight, to spell out what we were fighting for and what would be considered victory, angered me.
The young people who will be at risk deserve better.
And so do the grandmothers who pray that it all will work out.
