Mommy does not only have trouble with tickets and planes. She also has trouble with luggage. It does not always end up where she is, or she puts wrong things into it, or it disappears.
The first time that Mommy had trouble with luggage was on a trip from Los Angeles to Moscow via Helsinki on Finnair. When Mommy got to Moscow, her luggage was nowhere to be found. It never did show up. Mommy said it vanished into Finnair.
The next time Mommy lost luggage, it was only for a short period of time. Mommy flew from Prague to Monterey, but her luggage flew from Prague to Moscow. Mommy figured that out those M- cities must sound alike or look alike to baggage handlers.
Another time Mommy and Daddy went to Florida and took their kayak with them. They put the paddles into a golf bag and tied it with a tarp. When the bag did not show up, the customer service representative asked them to pick out the kind of bag that was missing from a book of pictures. There was nothing like their bag there!
Mommy also gets into trouble with luggage because of what she puts into it. Once she packed a bottle of wine in her bag, thinking to hand carry it. At the last minute, she forgot and checked the bag. The wine came through great.
However, some other guy must have done the same thing because when Mommy flew from the Ukraine (another one of those former Soviet Union countries) to Middlebury, Vermont, where she was teaching a summer semester course, her bag was underneath some man's bag who had packed a whole suitcase full of vodka. The vodka bottles had broken and leaked into Mommy's suitcase. All her clothes were soaked with vodka. When Mommy finally got to the college, after a series of delayed plane flights, the laundry room was locked. All she could do was dry out her clothes. She had to teach a class before the laundry room opened, so she went to class reeking of vodka. If she wanted to make an impression, she probably did!
The worst time was when Mommy brought back a jar of bryusnika, little red cranberries from Siberia. She forgot all about the jar being in her suitcase when she checked it. When the bag arrived home, everything was all red: clothes, books, and Mommy's presents for us. (The red did not wash out, either.) Mommy just washed everything off, and to this day we have some red reminders on our bookshelves and in Mommy's closet of that trip.
Conclusion: Just figure that with luggage what goes in is not necessarily what comes out.
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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.
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About Me
- Elizabeth Mahlou
- I am the mother of 4 birth children (plus 3 others who lived with us) and grandmother of 2, all of them exceptional children. Married for 42 years, I grew up in Maine, live in California, and work in many places in education, linguistics, and program management. In my spare time, I rescue and tame feral cats and have the scars to prove it. A long-time ignorantly blissful atheist converted by a theophanic experience to Catholicism, I am now a joyful catechist. Oh, I also authored a dozen books, two under my pen name of Mahlou (Blest Atheist and A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God).
Recommended Reading List
Because I am blog inept, I don't quite know how to get a reading list to stay at the end of the page and not disappear from sight. Therefore, I entered it as my first post. I suppose that is not all that bad because readers started commenting about the books, even suggesting additional readings. So, you can participate with others in my reading list by clicking here.I do post additional books as I read them and find them to be meaningful to me, and therefore, hopefully, meaningful to you. One advantage of all the plane traveling I do is that I acquire reading time that I might not otherwise take.
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