Read Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer for Free Online Page A

“We agree.”
    After more than twenty years on this job, I haven’t gotten over the fun of deciding at the last minute that I’d like to fly across the country, showing up at the airport, and doing just that—flying free.

C HAPTER 17
     

     

Becoming Pregnant Just Before Joining AARP
     
    I n my first book,
101 Amazing Things About God
, I wrote about how we had our first child at age forty-five. What I don’t explain in that story is that I was the only one who was forty-five. My husband, Tom, was in high school. Or he looked like it.
    Tom is exactly eight years and ten months younger than I am. Round that difference to nine years, multiply by good genes, and divide by a short haircut (which makes him looklike a teenager), and you have the basis for the high-school quip.
    You may think I am exaggerating—as writers are wont to do—about how young my husband looks. That’s why I’ve come prepared with actual documentation of humiliations I’ve endured while married to someone who was in third grade when I started college. And further humiliations I endured as a result of getting pregnant just prior to joining AARP.
    In 1995, I was forty-four. Tom looked twelve.
    We had no children yet. Tom and I were both working: he as an aerospace engineer, and I was a flight attendant who had a few ideas for books. At the time I was so low in seniority that the only flights the airline allowed me to work were all-night trips from Seattle to Anchorage, Alaska, and back.
    I would leave at seven in the evening and get home at eight in the morning, and then I would try to get some sleep before working the next night. However, I never did get sleep because we had a neighbor named Greeta who was ninety years old and suffering from dementia.
    Greeta loved crows. Every morning she’d put into practice the feeding of the five thousand. Standing in front of waves of crows, green scarf flying in the wind, she’d throw bread and promise free healthcare to all. The crows loved it. The cawing was so loud that it drowned out the occasional test run of a 747 engine at the Boeing aircraft company close to our home.
    I confess that the reason I know so many details about Greeta is that in my half-jet-lagged, half-dead state with no sleep, I’d lose perspective on what really mattered. I’d pull a chair up to the window where, looking between the slats of the plastic blinds, I’d watch and take notes. I knew that years down the road, this would be good fodder for a book, and my lost sleep would not be in vain.
    Golden Greeta the Crow Feeda went on for hours. Then just as she’d give up and wave her hand at the crows and say, “You’ll never vote for me anyway,” it would be time to get ready for another all-nighter from Seattle to Anchorage.
    Now there is something you should know about being a flight attendant: there is no humidity on the aircraft. The air is so dry that if you leave a piece of roast beef out for two hours, it becomes beef jerky. Unfortunately, the air has the same effect on skin.
    So me and my beef-jerky face finally finished three all-nighters in a row, and my refreshed, young husband met me at the gate. Then we decided to go to shopping for some new clothes for him.
    We picked a famous department store near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. I was sitting outside the men’s room when Tom came out to model new jeans. He stood in front of me and said, “How do you like these?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so, honey.”
    “I like them!” he said with a confidence that told me he was buying them.
    Tom then went back into the dressing room and the sales clerk came over to comment. “At that age,” she said, “you can’t tell them anything.”
    At that age, you can’t tell them anything
. Suddenly I got it. She was confirming my worst fear. Tom was thirty-five years old, and she thought I was his mother. I kept opening and closing my mouth and couldn’t think of a thing to say. That’s when Tom came out and