Mother's Day Moment
This week had me traveling to South Florida for Wednesday and Thursday. My 9:30am flight on Wednesday out of JFK in NY left the gate 1-1/2 hours late and arrived at the gate in West Palm Beach 2-1/2 hours behind schedule. How does the delay grow by one hour, you may be asking? Simple: when we landed, in the middle of a torrential downpour, with thunder and lightning in the distance, the ground crew was not able (either by FAA or Union regulations) to help our aircraft the final few yards to our ultimate destination so we could deplane. So there we sat until the storm passed. So much for me getting to attend our Florida region meeting that I traveled down for. From what I’ve been told it was a tremendous success. Sorry I missed it.
Yesterday I flew back to NY from West Palm. What I didn’t realize when I booked this trip was my return to NY would be at the beginning of the Mother’s Day weekend. I was on a totally sold out JetBlue flight with the longest wheelchair parade I’ve ever seen boarding a commercial airliner. What was more amazing was the recovery many of the wheelchair bound passengers experienced during the flight. If there were 20 wheelchairs boarding the plane, enough miracles occurred in flight to only need seven wheelchairs when we arrived at LaGuardia. It must be the blue JetBlue chips that did it.
In any event, I made it back for Mother’s Day weekend. Of course, Mother’s Day is actually Sunday, but in the Weiner household we tend to expand these occasions from a single day to an entire weekend. Tracy’s extended family has a longstanding tradition of meeting every year in Round Top, NY (the Catskills), at the Glen Falls House to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend. Three generations of her family will gather there this weekend, rain or shine, as they (now we) have done for over 40 years. Mothers, daughters, granddaughters, sisters, aunts and nieces, not to mention the men, will spend the weekend eating, drinking, playing, reminiscing and just simply enjoying each other’s company.
We’ll leave upstate NY after lunch on Sunday and head to Long Island (usually a 3-4 hour drive in traffic) for dinner with my 83-year-old mother, who recently made her annual spring pilgrimage (on JetBlue – no wheelchair, thankfully) from Florida to NY for the summer. And then it will be back into NYC Sunday night (again in traffic) to get the little ones to sleep at a reasonable enough hour so they can wake up for school on time and rested Monday morning (that goes for Tracy and me, too).
To Tracy, my mom Sondra, Tracy’s mom Carole, and all of you out there who are mothers: Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you enjoy your special day, preferably with a little extra pampering and attention. You all certainly deserve it!
