flashback

It was one of those time-travel moments: I suddenly felt as though I had dropped out of a sunny Sunday afternoon in September, 2005 and into the 1950s.

Along Toronto's Airport Road, scores of lawn chairs, all facing south, eyes and binoculars toward Pearson International Airport. They had come, parents and children together, to watch the planes land.

During my early childhood, it was a routine entertainment on a Sunday afternoon for parents and children on Chicago's southwest side. Fingers entwined in the 10-foot chain link fence, we stood along 55th Street and watched the propeller planes come and go at Midway Airport. At its busiest, in 1959, Midway handled 10,000,000 passengers. O'Hare -- not long ago itself the busiest airport in the world -- was, at the time, just a far-flung freight handling facility that wouldn't receive commercial passengers for several years.

Seeing families along Airport Road yesterday tickled me. In this highly-jaded, digital Darwinian world -- witness the popularity of Survivor and other reality shows -- it's a pleasure to see that people can still be thrilled for a whole afternoon by one little century-old miracle -- human flight.