Sunday, July 31, 2011

A hot day

....and I'm bored....
....really bored....

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Peanuts on a Plane

It was a holiday. The kind of holiday that family congregates and reminisces. I realize that could be any holiday and I suppose that’s why I can’t tell you which one and won’t attempt. Memory serves no indication of location or season, so I’m sticking with “It was a holiday”.



As all familial conversations do, the topics circled and circled and finally landed on travel. I’m sure an aunt was nervous about how her stomach would handle her upcoming cruise, which might have led to the conversation about various methods of vacationing. To this day, I have never vacationed on the water. Cruise ship travel is foreign to me. I might have said that aloud. It’s all together possible that my confession caused another aunt to admit to never having boarded a plane.



But here, here is where I remember. I remember that whatever holiday with whichever aunts (there are many!) in whatever roundabout way of conversation led me to telling them all about the first time I was ever on a plane.



My first flight was MKE to Jamaica with a friend’s family when I was a freshman in high school, in a thunderstorm no less, but that was not the story I told them. I told them the story of the first time I was on a plane. A different story all together.

I remembered being at a very young age, I’m talking pre-school young. I remember walking onto the plane and being greeted by friendly flight attendants. I remember fastening my buckle and how big it felt in my tiny child hands. We had peanuts, I definitely remember that. But this is where my memory ends.

Probably at the sound of my voice and the shape of my story, my mother’s ears perked up and she yelled out across the room to call my bluff. You see, my mom knows that we weren’t the kind of family to travel by plane. Ever. To anywhere. We were always a family of five driving a minivan with a pop-up camper in tow. The thing is... I know this fact too, which is why it came out of my own mouth as uncertain memory. It didn’t make sense. I’ll admit that and my mother thought she caught me. I could tell by the gloating excitement nestled under her tone. The words she yelled out, the words I could hear excitement poking through, were “Mary, you were never on a plane when you were little.”



I shook my head, maybe even slapped my knee and insisted that I had. I described again and again how much I remembered but that I didn’t remember going anywhere. It’s not that it was because we went somewhere and I have a failed memory (though this story may not disprove THAT theory), it’s because we really didn’t go anywhere. I remember we boarded, ate our peanuts and left.



I may have been red in the face at this point, persisting with my mother in front of my 900 aunts as they watched in disbelief. After all, mothers would know whether or not their 3 year old was boarding a plane alone. Minutes (feeling like hours) into my insistence, my mother’s face finally went soft. Her eyes sparkled the sparkle of recognition. She then told me about a daycare teacher that used to take us all on really cool field trips. She realized my memory was one of them.



I think about that memory now and it saddens me a bit. How travel has changed in 20 years, there’s no way a three year old today would be able to sit and eat peanuts on a plane to nowhere. More importantly, that a three year old would never have the opportunity twenty years later to disprove their upbringing to their very own mother.

 Today, I also can’t help to think ….. Which old family friend arrived at the airport that day that my daycare provider just had to pick up mid-shift, kids in tow? “Field trip” Right….