Column: Disastrous weather, an airport bomb scare and a lesson from Walter Payton that I’m taking into the new year

A few months back my son was invited to participate in a lacrosse showcase in Delray Beach, Florida, in December. Book it, I said, picturing ocean-front meals and sunset walks and all the things that thaw Chicagoans’ bones.

Mother Nature had other plans, tossing torrential rains and flash floods and dangerous winds and other coastal hazards at us from the moment we landed.

No sweat, we figured. We watched the waves crash angrily on the coast between downpours. We found a mall. We found great pizza. (Anthony’s Coal Fired, if you’re near Boca Raton.) We watched “Top Gun” and “Forrest Gump” and a whole lot of “Friends” in our hotel room.

The weather cooperated for the showcase, which was a full day of my son playing his heart out and a full day of me marveling, once again, at how much growing up requires kids to dive into uncharted waters and set themselves up to very publicly sink or swim, to be accepted or rejected, delighted or disappointed. It’s a lot for their hearts. And ours.

Anyway, we ended the weekend feeling grateful and glad.

Then we got to the airport to fly home.

We had just reached the front of the security line — shoes removed, bags on the conveyor belt — when an agent started yelling for everyone to clear the area. The airport was being evacuated. Details were sketchy, but we were told to move quickly.

At first we were allowed to wait on the sidewalk directly outside the terminal. Then police cars started arriving, lights and sirens, and we were told to move away from the building. Eventually we were ushered onto the lower level inside baggage claim to await further instructions.

The waiting spread into an hour, then two. The instructions remained minimal. Babies cried. Tempers flared. People fought over the precious few outlets to charge our phones and laptops. News stories started to trickle onto my phone about a bomb threat.

As we entered our third hour of waiting, an agitated man approached and asked if he could charge his tablet next to my phone. He had just arrived in Florida for rehab, he explained. It would be his fifth stint. He was desperate to get to the facility, but the vehicle scheduled to pick him up couldn’t get to the terminal and his tablet was dead so he couldn’t reach anyone.

Together we tracked down the number for the facility. They were, indeed, expecting him. We put the woman helping us on speaker and tried to hatch a plan for getting a Lyft to a closed-down airport to collect a man with no phone and no money and a dead tablet and I had two thoughts.

My first was Kim White, a woman I met in 2018, whose mother heart I grew to love, who I wrote about on another December day, who lost her son Al to a heroin overdose. She told me that Al checked himself out of every rehab facility she and her husband checked him into and still they never gave up trying.

“Eventually, we tried a place in Florida,” she told me, “and this was our reasoning: If we send him to Florida and he leaves, he’ll be OK because it’s warm there. I mean, as a parent, you’re thinking, ‘It’s warm there. He won’t freeze. It’s warm there.’”

My second thought was how it feels to witness systems breaking down around you and the human toll in front of you. And to feel powerless to do much about it.

Did I help that man get to rehab? I honestly don’t know. The woman had just located a Lyft when an announcement arrived that the terminal was reopened and we should return to security. I needed my phone back. We had a flight to catch. (Our flight left without us, in the end.) The man described what he was wearing and the woman assured him she would tell the driver where and how to find him. I said goodbye and left. I’ll probably wonder about him forever.

Two days later, we were back in Chicago and driving to school. Jarrett Payton, son of Bears legend Walter Payton, was on the AM radio station 670 The Score, telling a story from his childhood about his dad taking him to Toys R Us four days before Christmas and setting him loose with four personal shoppers.

“Money’s no object,” his dad told him. “Get whatever you want.”

On the ride home, car packed to the gills, they turned left instead of right and eventually arrived at an apartment complex, where Walter Payton knocked on a door — son and toys in tow.

“My dad got a letter from this father saying he lost his job and was there any way that he could get a signed football for his family because they were huge Bears fans and that would take care of Christmas,” Jarrett Payton recalled. “All the toys I thought were going back to my house in South Barrington, Illinois, were actually going to this family.

“That’s the moment when I figured out what my passion was,” he continued. “It was giving back and serving. Doing something for other people that couldn’t do anything for me, maybe, but in the grand scheme of things they did. They showed me what it was like to love each other and not to have a lot but still have each other.”

Something about hearing the story, on the heels of my crazy weekend, struck me silent. We need sustainable systems. We need social safety nets.

And we also need each other. To advocate for those systems and safety nets, and to jump in and help when they break down. This isn’t a story of me patting myself on the back for doing that. I’m not sure I did. This is a story of me being reminded to always try.

It’s how I’m ending this year, and it’s how I hope and plan to spend the new one. And maybe, hopefully, some of that resonates with you.

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