Praying for Eyebrowz

On Sunday morning I accompanied my 16-year-old granddaughter to the airport to catch a flight home to Illinois. I didn’t leave the airport until her plane was in the air just in case they had to return to the gate.

After the plane pulled away from the gate a harried looking couple came running to the desk. The man was frantic, calling “Where’s the agent?”

He pointed at the plane on the tarmac, looked at me, and asked, “Is that the flight to Charlotte?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Where’s the gate agent?”

I shrugged.

The woman remained calm while her traveling companion raged. “We’re late. We’ll have to take a later flight,” she said.

“But it’s right there!” He said, pointing out the window again.

The gate agent returned to angry demands. “You need to have that plane open up.”

“I’m sorry sir, but once the doors are closed the plane can’t return unless there’s a mechanical problem or the flight is cancelled.”

The man strode up and down the terminal aisle letting the few people still hanging around know how he’d been wronged. When the flight took off he finally realized that he wasn’t going to get his way and slumped into a seat.

Meanwhile, the woman calmly rebooked their flight to Key West through Charlotte, N.C., and checked their luggage.

I left, but couldn’t help wondering how the remainder of their vacation went. I’ll bet she’ll have a good time, regardless. Him, not so much.

Peace, people.

Our sixteen-year-old granddaughter, McKayla, flew home to Illinois today after spending the past week with Studly Doright and me here at Doright Manor in the Florida panhandle. While it wasn’t her first time to fly, it was her first solo adventure, and it included a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I was nervous about sending her off on her own, but McKayla is a competent young woman and I knew with a few instructions she’d be just fine. But this morning we woke to heavy rain, including thunderstorms, that extended all along the first part of her plane’s flight path and I began worrying about such things as delayed and/or cancelled flights. What if’s began attacking my thoughts. I just couldn’t let her go into the blue without some safeguards.

So we paid the extra fee to ensure that someone from the airline would walk her between gates and look after her until she was safely in her mom’s arms in Chicago. Money well spent—I was able to relax knowing she wouldn’t have to navigate any setbacks alone.

Of course I won’t totally relax until she and our daughter are safely back in their home, but the airline didn’t provide that kind of post-flight assistance. Can we begin teleporting soon? It’d be a lot easier on my nerves. Of course then I’d find something else to worry about. Like, did all my molecules arrive simultaneously?

Peace, people!

Traveling down the interstate highways north of Paducah, Kentucky, on through Nashville, Tennessee, and down into Birmingham, Alabama, every half mile or so we came across a poor dead animal—most often a deer—whose carcass litters the roadway.

At one point I thought I spotted a coyote among the dead, but no, it was just another dadgum dead dear. I think that phrase would make a fine song title.

Dadgum Dead Deer. It’ll be a hit.

Peace, people.