Holiday Flying
So it is significant to note that this Christmas was the first time that we made all of our visits without buying a single plane ticket! Now, I will be the first in line to be thankful for air travel; the past 8 years would have been super lonely if I had never (or rarely) made it West to see my family and friends. But, I have to confess that I am still a little afraid of flying and that I start to feel claustrophobic after about 3 ½ hours of flight. It really is a battle of the mind for me. I was making progress and had become almost comfortable with flying right up until Señor Carlos began verbalizing the sincere desires of his heart. Maybe we should have suspected that he would be a thrill seeker when he was just 9 months old. We took him to a reproduction of the James Bond “Casino Royale” set at Universal Studios, and our tender little baby was ecstatic to witness cars ablaze and grand-scale explosions. (At the other extreme, Arianna was in tears and begged to leave.) To put it simply, Carlos’s daily aspiration is to witness a fiery car crash or—better yet—to be involved in said crash.
It is one thing to have an interest in screeching brakes and compacting metal. It is another thing to apply this reckless obsession to all vehicular interests, especially airplanes. But Carlos can, and does. Consider the following script.
Mommy: Time to sit down and buckle your seat belt!
Carlos: Are we starting to fly?
Mommy: The airplane is going to drive really fast for a minute, and then it will fly into the air.
Carlos: Yeah! Our airplane is going to go up, VVVVVVV, flying and flying and then, PPPPPPPPBBBBB, it’s going to CRASH!
Mommy: No, we’re not going to crash. [Mommy clutches both arm rests].
Carlos: It’s so COOL, Mom! We’re going to go up, up, up, VVVVVVVV, and then CRASH, PPPPKKKKK, like this! [Hand motions emphasize the plane’s sudden death spiral.]
Carlos spends the rest of the flight pointing to the emergency-landing pictures and indicating that ALL THAT FUN could be ours IF ONLY the plane would crash!
So, Mommy was happy to spend this December on the road rather than in the air.
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