ATLANTA AIRPORT

I FLEW SOUTH TO FIND SPRING not long ago and changed planes in Atlanta, hiking from Gate C-8 to Gate C-18 and carrying the blue gym bag I’ve learned to stuff everything in since the day a brown suitcase of mine left me in Dallas and flew off to spend a week by itself. Airline terminals, as everyone knows, are designed to make people happy to board planes, and I was looking forward to mine as I approached the gate, and then I heard music. Cheerful music, tooting, like a mechanical ocarina. “Easter Parade”—the chorus. It came from a small pink plush rabbit standing on a glass display case in a souvenir shop across Concourse C from C-18. The rabbit, who could also march, had come to a dead end against a stack of boxes and stood there kicking it. I sat in the lounge by the gate and looked out the window across the dock and the taxi strip, and heard about twenty choruses of “Easter Parade” before I realized that the rabbit was battery-powered and wouldn’t wind down anytime soon. My watch showed 2:40. My plane was scheduled to go at 3:00.

The effect of a short musical selection endlessly repeated is maddening, of course—an effect not contemplated by Irving Berlin when he penned the number for the Broadway revue As Thousands Cheer, to be first warbled by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb (September 30, 1933), whence it scored big and became the title song of an M-G-M Garland-and-Astaire cinemusical, whence it became the pop Easter standard in America. It never was my favorite Irving Berlin song. As the rabbit kept plugging it, I thought of others I liked more—“Puttin’ On the Ritz” and “All Alone,” and even “White Christmas” —but with the “E. P. ” loop going round and round, bonnet after bonnet with all the frills upon it, I couldn’t hum even “Have you seen the well-to-do up and down Park Avenue,” from “Puttin’ On the Ritz”; even the notes of “I’m dreaming of a” left me.

I wasn’t alone in the lounge. About half the fifty or so blue vinyl seats were occupied by three o’clock, when a woman at the check-in counter announced that the plane had not arrived yet and so would be late in departing. Most of my fellow waiters seemed to be aware of the song and to have traced it to the rabbit. Many of them, to judge from the looks they gave the rabbit and the clerk at the souvenir stand, seemed to know that they were going quietly, politely berserk. Conversation dried up. At 3:20, the woman said the plane still had not arrived but would, momentarily. When I left “Easter Parade” and boarded the plane, it was 3:45. I guessed that I had heard more than 250 choruses.

Why I didn’t walk across the concourse, pick up the rabbit, open the hatch on its back, and remove the batteries is a question I ask, too, and why I didn’t at least say, out loud, “That is driving me crazy,” so my companions would know for certain that the rabbit was a shared, not a personal, rabbit. I only point out that passengers are an obedient lot, and airline passengers are the most pliable of all, tending to believe that the plane is kept aloft by their karma, that an angry word or thought might create engine trouble. I have sat on planes parked at gates for more than an hour with no sensible explanation from the crew and no questions asked from the tourist cabin. People who fly are in a delicate position—prayerful, even penitential—which makes personal desires seem immaterial. When a steward says, “Care for a drink?” I think, Sure, fine, whatever’s best— you decide. I don’t like to make demands so high in the air; and even in the terminal, with my feet on the beige carpeting, I’m in a mood to go along.

But don’t think I’ll sit still the next time. In fact, I’m waiting for the next time right now. I’m ready. Next time, look out! I’m going to move. Any one of a dozen things might set me off. Nobody knows what the others might be, and I’m not going to say. I know I speak for a number of persons—who knows how many? Tens of thousands. One of these days, someone is going to take simple, direct action against a simple, idiotic object. He or she may be you or me. We are going to yank the plug and restore peace.