So we are just going to pretend that this, here, now, is both the 28th and the 29th. At once. We are living two days simultaneously. This is for my sake, because I like to finish things I start (ahem, 30 days of blog posting, ahem).
My dad called me at 7:05 yesterday morning to tell me that my grandma, his mom, had died during the night. We had known for several days that she was not swallowing, and she was fading quickly.
Thirteen and a half hours later I had worked a full day, bought a flight to the Mitten, reserved a hotel at the airport in Gone West, gone to fighting class, packed (in one tiny suitcase despite the need for winter clothes - victory), and was driving to the city.
Twenty-three hours after he called me, I was on a plane, and seven and a half hours after that, I was hugging my dad and mom in the airport in Greater River Town, where I went to college/university.
Flying in, over that familiar flight pattern, I realized that the Greater River Town airport is probably the airport into and out of which I have flown the most, of any in the world. Whether I am going to State of Happiness or New York or Rwanda, i almost always fly through Greater River Town. It is a little further from my parents' house, and still not that big (in college we used to mock it for still listing the morning's arrivals and departures at 10 pm, because all the day's flights only made up two screens worth of listings), but flights to Greater River Town are often significantly cheaper than to Azoo.
Random occurrences of two flights in early December:
A very short guy came out of the bathroom as I went in, but with that short guy swagger. He smirked at me in a checking out sort of way, and i smiled my pained polite smile, reserved for those who seem like annoying assholes. When I got into the bathroom, the seat was covered in pee. Really? You can't be bothered to move the seat? Instead you are going to make me wipe it down. Keep it klassy, dude. Sometimes first impressions are so right.
The woman sitting next to me started hacking uncontrollably about three hours into our flight to Chicago. Despite the fact that I packed for a week in a tiny suitcase and a purse, I pulled out a cough drop, like a magician from nothing, and gave it to her. Apparently packing light and packing unprepared are not the same thing.
The gate agent in Chicago made me throw away my beverage at the jetway. I was confused. "I thought you were allowed to take drinks on the plane if you bought them in the airport." I said. "Nope," he said, "you have to get rid of it." So I shrugged and threw it away, and as I got on the plane the man who was now just in front of me said, "That was weird. I bring drinks on the plane all the time. But you handled it really well." Just inside the plane, we asked the flight attendant, and she said, "Oh, there are lots of reasons. We don't know how much alcohol is in it, for one," and I started laughing. Apparently you are not allowed to bring alcoholic beverages on the plane. And yes, I had purchased my beverage at a bar. It was club soda and lime, and only the bar had club soda.
I almost just accidentally pasted some law on the bottom of this. Thank you, Webster, for pasting at random.
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