Atlanta, Boston, then, now ... sad, bad

A week ago Tuesday, I was running a little late in getting to The Eastern Iowa Airport.

Everybody at the TSA area there was friendly to me, as always. Except maybe for the one guy who said my wallet was abnormally large. So he had it run through their scanner.

It's true, I have a George Costanza wallet. Meaning, it's stuffed with stuff. Business cards, credit cards, Social Security cards, library cards, you name it. And that TSA agent has guidelines to follow and things to watch, like oversized wallets. But the delay, which was probably all of 90 seconds tops, quietly irritated me.

At the Masters for five straight days, the same security people checked my same bag to find the same things in it each day. But I knew what they didn't, which is I wasn't bringing in any object they didn't allow on their premises. So, I was irritated. But again, quietly.

It wasn't as if I had to go through Augusta National's metal-detectors, which the general public did. Those devices, by the way, looked like they'd be the envy of most airports. Or small countries. The Masters didn't get to be the Masters by cutting any corners.

Monday morning, I flew home from Columbia, S.C., a city with a very nice airport. But there was another set of TSA agents, another mental list of things for me to try to remember (and forget).

Take the laptop out of the carry-on bag. Take off my jacket. Take off my shoes. Don't lose my boarding pass in the process, a blunder I always seem to put in play on any trip.

I forgot I had to take the tube of sunblock from my carry-on bag, so I had to put it in a plastic baggie. Which was OK, because it was at the three-ounce limit for liquids, aerosols and gels. But still … an irritation.

I found myself remembering the days when you just checked in, and glided without a care to your gate. Those days really did exist. But they're long, long gone. And as Monday's events in Boston reminded us, they're gone forever. But they've been gone for a long time now.

Seventeen years ago I was in Atlanta and saw the looks on the faces of the people who had witnessed the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park, basically the town square of those Summer Olympics. All Olympic events the next day were postponed. On that gray Saturday, people were edgy. When we had to wait much longer than normal for a MARTA train at a downtown station, we started wondering if something had gone badly wrong underground. Nerves were raw, to say the least.

I remember doing laundry that night in the basement of the college dormitory in which I was staying, exhausted after being up all night interviewing people who had been at that park. I was rattled. I recall wishing I were going home instead of spending a second week there. But the Games resumed. We got up the next morning and moved forward. It's what you do.

Monday morning, I flew from Columbia to Atlanta to Cedar Rapids. I spent three hours in the Atlanta airport. I thought about food, the Popeyes chicken restaurant in the airport to be specific. I thought about sleep. But not once in that layover did it occur to me to think about that night in Atlanta in 1996.

Then I got home, and looked at messages being posted on Twitter about an explosion in Boston. The news got progressively worse. Seventeen years ago suddenly seemed like, well, yesterday.