Home at Last for Queen CLT
Greetings, with one hopeful season-opener headline for air travelers this busy holiday season: Return of Queen Charlotte statue launches pre-holiday lobby expansions at Charlotte airport.
This recent piece from The Charlotte Observer, saved and planned as a timely newShrink item, is welcome for many or most, both local and those just passing-through.
The enormously busy Charlotte-Douglas International Airport brings to mind signature rocking chairs and endless construction-congestion, not exactly the crown-jewels of trip convenience and comfort. A look at the progress and long-needed improvements:
Removal and rehab of the statue was part of the airport's "Destination CLT, a $2.5 billion to $3.1 billion capital investment program under way since 2010 to renovate and expand the facility.
Just after the statue’s arrival, another expansion project is the new security checkpoint on the west side of the new terminal lobby. Checkpoint 1 with eight screening lanes consolidates TSA operations and includes new technology enhancements for more efficient passenger screening. More baggage areas also will be opening up next month. “It’s going to significantly help our holiday travel by giving us a lot more space,” said Jack Christine, chief infrastructure officer of the airport.
The story touches on the statue’s historic namesake, wife of colonial King George III, for whom the city is named.
The iconic 15-foot-tall Queen Charlotte bronze statue rises to the second floor atop a 30-foot pedestal. The statue that once stood outside the airport entrance atop a water fountain now greets travelers in the center of the main terminal lobby, now called the “Queen’s Court,” giving passengers a large waiting area where concessions like Queen Charlotte’s Kitchen have opened.
Over her 33 years the statue has had her detractors, spoofs and downright silly lampoons. On a personal note, I have always loved her, especially when she was outdoors and… a little wild as well as regal. For me that resilient push-pull against walloping wind so vividly and eloquently suggests jet-force and aviation, so appropriate to her setting.
Another, even more passionate lover of the statue, as well as this airport, and in fact pretty much all things of her beloved hometown of Charlotte, has long been my 95-year-old, second-generation native mom. As a small child nearly 100 years ago, during the much earlier years of aviation, for the much smaller City of Charlotte her dad/my maternal grandfather supervised all things motor-vehicular and transport-related. His lifelong friend was Ben Douglas, the former mayor for whom the airport is named. (My mom was friends in school and later with Ben’s son and daughter-in-law, as I was later still with his grandkids.) Mom was the younger, daddy’s-girl of two sisters. She’s long repeated stories of being the one taken behind her mom’s back to not-dainty things she loved at the airport — things like test flights, air shows, hot-air balloons. Even recently she’s been retelling one of these favorite memories: Trips with her dad, still in her Sunday School dresses from First Baptist Church, to the oily plane-maintenance shops and for him to trouble-shoot issues at the marvelous nearby city garbage-dump!
All of which has brought this Queen Charlotte/Douglas Airport story into sharp, very different, and eerily timed focus, as news of a monumental nature began to unfold on the most personal of subjects: My mother Jane, herself.
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After her recent hospital stay with apparent rallying from infections to return to her assisted living, there was a whiplash-fast reversal and decline that quite immediately signaled admission to our wonderful local Hospice House. In this, following her long well-stated and detailed directives was very clear, though of course also difficult and bittersweet.
Visited much and tended lovingly over the past week and a half, Jane gently left us on this past glorious sunny October Thursday morning. After the holiday season, on or around the January MLK holiday weekend, we will celebrate her.
It will be back home in her beloved Charlotte, as with Queen CLT.
call to readers
I share this planned celebration piece here in newShrink as well as elsewhere, for several of you readers have known and had wonderful relationships with my mom Jane, as well as some with my late dad Dick — in many cases in ways that haven’t involved or been about me. Given Mom’s advanced age (and that of the rest of us!) plus challenges of geography and health for many, her celebration will combine more intimate in-person gathering with more virtual together-in-spirit contributions that are shareable later too. So these next couple of months I’ll be gathering, and would love your sending, calling or meeting with me with any of your favorite Jane- or Dick-and-Jane stories and memories — the funnier and/or more touching the better.
At the buffet-lunch part of the celebration, these can either be shared by the sender as desired, or I’m happy to weave them into what gets presented one way or another. (Either with name-attributions, or anonymously shared, is optional, too!) Photos are great and welcome. Of course we hope all who can and want to will join us for either or both lunch and/or the later graveside dedication parts of this afternoon.
As those of you have known, Jane at her best effervescent self created such beauty, warmth, fierce love, fun and a divine spark of magic all around her. We’d so like her celebration to capture some of that (though no one can replicate, or even quite describe Jane!) All of these things, particularly a bit of simple beauty, ritual and mastery over her day-to-day surroundings, were essential to her as breathing. And all were so terribly lacking during these last four years of her Covid-and-medically forced, ugly “incarceration.” (Her word, and it was not a demented one.)
Here’s the initial obituary and photo that are to appear in today’s Charlotte Observer and will be posted elsewhere. There will be a more complete one with time and place details closer to the celebration and brief dedication at graveside afterward.
Meanwhile, to paraphrase the familiar lovely quote from Julian of Norwich, all here is well, all shall be exceeding well.
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And, that is all I have for now. Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
Tish, I'm so sorry for your loss. Though I never met your mother, the love and joy that surrounded her were always evident in your posts about her. You and your lovely family are in my thoughts!