Delta flight 1052
Disclaimer: For those of you who read in my niece’s blog: “No wonder I have family members who routinely buy prescription meds overseas during their vacations and essentially become cruisewear-sporting drug mules …” she of course didn’t mean Sis and me. She was referring to the farthest end of our family tree where the branches contain the far hairier scoff laws.
Correction: In a comment a while back, I misindexed Lucy’s Mom for Mrs. Who. Or was it Mrs. Who for Lucy’s Mom? Whichever, they are sisters. And I am old. So confusion is my current natural state.
Now. On to Delta flight 1052, Seattle to Atlanta:
The tiny young woman had the center seat, surrounded by hulks another business flyer and myself. She was so small she tucked her duffel under her feet as a foot rest. She told me she was a veterinarian in the army, on her way to Fairbanks for a few weeks.
“There aren’t army mules any more, are there?” I asked. “Just dogs, right?”
“And all the pets on the base. Thousands of them,” she informed me, refraining from adding you blithering idiot.
I asked if she knew anybody in Fairbanks which eventually led to her telling me about the first animal she saw as a military vet. Some soldiers brought in a dead rattler requiring an autopsy “to know whether the method of death was contagious.”
She stared at the dead snake. Then at them. “See those tire marks there?” she said.
I figured it was one of the gentler ways a new person on base has ever been hazed.
***
In the row ahead of me, a young man told the woman next to him how he met his wife. “She was in my high school in Savannah. The only student from Libya. She tried to look American but mostly dressed African. She had the ugliest shoes. So I bought her a pair of Nikes. We been together ever since.” This boy from Savannah had zeroed right in on the heart of every American woman … and American woman wannabe.
***
Across the aisle, a woman had a bumper sticker on her carry-on bag which stated: If you don’t stand behind our soldiers, stand in front of them. I didn’t actually get it, but I assume it meant so they could shoot you. Anyway, as we all rushed to leave the plane, a la corn popping out of its shell, she turned to a young man in uniform, squashed next to a window. “Thank you for your service,” she bleated, then went on down the aisle, not allowing him the opportunity to get out. Thanks for supporting the troops, lady.