One year, to save time, the husband and wife decided to fly from Austin to Iowa to see her dad for Christmas. Her dad’s health was in decline. The wife had no love for air travel, had much anxiety around getting to her destination on time. Christmas Eve morning, they dropped the dog off with a sitter and flew to Dallas to catch a connecting flight to Cedar Rapids. The wife had been watching the weather reports, hoping that the weather in Iowa wouldn’t mess up their travel. It didn’t. The weather in Dallas messed up their travel. There was a snow-and-ice storm in Dallas. The wife had not thought to worry about the weather in Dallas.
In Dallas, the husband and wife boarded the plane for their connecting flight to Cedar Rapids. The plane pulled away from the gate, but there’s only one de-icer at the Dallas airport because in Dallas the weather is warm. So the husband and wife and about two hundred other people waited on the plane nearly three hours to be de-iced, because the one Dallas de-icer broke down. There had recently been that JetBlue nightmare where people were stuck on the plane for so long they started eating their luggage and drinking their toiletries, or something, after which the NTSB dictated that if you’re on the runway for three hours you have to return to the gate.
So the husband and wife returned to the gate, and waited and waited, schlepped around the Dallas-size airport from gate to gate hoping to catch either a different flight to Iowa or a flight back to Austin. The husband and wife waited and read books and magazines, watched a movie on her computer, but as the end of the day grew closer and closer, the wife started to seriously freak out about spending the night at the airport and/or having to fly on Christmas and finally convinced the husband they should rent a car and go back to Austin so they wouldn’t mess up everyone’s Christmas in Iowa by having them have to come get them in Cedar Rapids, an hour away, on Christmas Day, if they even got there at all. The husband did not particularly love sudden avoidable expenses like this, but had great patience with the wife’s anxiety, so they dropped 300 bucks on a last-minute rental car, by which time it was creeping toward midnight, though the couple still thought the highway back to Austin would be fine, because there wasn’t much more than an inch of snow on the ground. There was, however, an inch of ice underneath the inch of snow on the ground, and the highway system in Texas didn’t seem to have that much more in place for ice removal than their airport did, so when they got into the car to head for the highway, Austin three hours away, the wife was so tired as to be near delirious as well as fearful of an accident. It’s all okay, we’ll get a room, the husband said, and they pulled off the road at the first exit, into the nearest motel, and went straight to sleep.
The next morning, near Waco on the way home, they were about to pull off the exit to a Starbucks for some holiday lattes, and a Texas Ranger pulled them over for speeding. Small and wiry, older, the brim of his Ranger hat way too big for his overly, aggressively tilted head, but no less sure of himself for it, on Christmas morning a Texas Ranger handed them a $150 speeding ticket like it was a present to himself and sent them on their way. At least they’d get to be with their dog. They ended the day with Chinese food. It won’t be her last Christmas with her dad. It won’t. It won’t.