Here’s something I learned: Sometimes what a place looks like on the outside changes depending on how you feel on the inside.
To explain what I’m talking about, let me tell you about the Denver International Airport.
Some airports are big, and some are small. Some are square and glass, some are brown and flat. Some, like the Denver airport, look like a long spiky row of white circus tents.
There are quite a few unique things about the Denver airport. I looked it up once.
The Denver airport is the biggest airport in the country, by almost two times, and is the third largest in the world.
There’s a blue stallion statue near the entrance that has sort of devilish eyes and it fell over and killed its sculptor while it was being made. There are also psychedelic murals throughout the airport, many showing crowds of people with strange faces and rainbow-colored clothes jammed in with jaguars and tropical flowers. On one, there’s a Nazi soldier in a wrinkly, pale gas mask, next to a letter from a little boy who died at Auschwitz. I don’t know why a painter would want to paint that. Or why airport staff would want to hang it on the wall.
The Denver airport is a weird airport.
Sometimes you’re in a strange gray place with even stranger paintings and statues and it feels like you’re in a horror movie and the painted people are watching you.
And then someone you love comes, like maybe your sister’s husband who the whole family is there at the airport to pick up, who your sister hasn’t seen in months. And then it’s him in his jeans and T-shirt and your sister’s arms wrapped around his neck being reflected in the shiny chrome walls, and in the reflection you see him bend down and give her pregnant belly a big kiss, and the rainbow-clothed people look happy, too, and even when you remember the horse statue out front it doesn’t seem so demonic, just a little mischievous.
It cost two billion dollars more than they expected to build the Denver airport. I think it was worth it.