First published in the Tri Town Transcript, Jan 13, 2019
By Esther C. Baird
Here in 2019 we’re going to have a positive new year attitude and pretend that nothing gives me greater joy than the return of making school lunches. We’re also going to pretend that my family never gets sick, and anything that resembles a virus that has infected and then, unbelievably, re- infected us, is merely an illusion. I’m determined to be positive because our Christmas trip to Miami gave us a dose of sunshine, palms trees, warm breezes and a near miss on being throw in jail.
What’s not to celebrate?
OK, maybe we weren’t almost thrown in jail, but someone, somewhere, deep within the bowels of “luggage land” at the airport is not impressed.
We have a family rule of never checking bags. This rule worked great when our two girls were young, or when we traveled to places where you didn’t need clothes, which to be clear is nowhere. Now, our girls are older and, as one of the two voting members in our family of four, I declared we were checking bags this Christmas.
“I have to take all the presents on top of everything else,” I explained to my husband, the other voting member. And since I am the singular voting member in the Christmas Shopping For Every Single Person Club, I won.
We checked three bags and were relieved to have all the luggage show up in Florida with nothing amiss. Or was it? As I began to unpack the presents, I found slips in the suitcases saying TSA had selected our bags for a search. I laughed. I hoped they enjoyed the bevy of sweaters and shirts and sneakers all in the size-of-the-month for each daughter.
And then I pulled out a present, located rather near the TSA tag, and froze. It was a pocket blow torch.
That’s right, I brought a blowtorch on the plane. Sure it was in the luggage compartment far below the passengers, but obviously it was not a standard thing to pack. I’d been distracted by visions of easily lit summer bonfires when I purchased it as a Christmas present for my husband. Whoops. Blow torches were not on the list of ways to make friends with the airlines.
Still, it’s not like I’d attempted to blow torch the seat back pocket in front of me to make more room so I could cross my legs before the person in front me reclined their seat, like only the worst sort of people do. (If you recline your seat, stop it! It’s a crime against the very fabric of humanity!) It’s not like I tried to weld the teeny tiny sink to the on position so that I had a chance to rinse the soap off my hands before the water turned off. It’s not like I tampered with the lavatory smoke detector with my portable flamethrower.
Oh, am I digressing?
We made it down without incident, at least in the real world, if not in my overly annoyed mind, and then it was Christmas. My daughter opened up one of her gifts: a pair of Adidas joggers in navy blue with white stripes and … what was that? A not very fashion forward security tag the size of a silver dollar clipped right at the ankle.
Huh. I held it up and studied it. I knew better than to try and rip it off — I’d rip the pants. But it wasn’t a normal security tag, I leaned in and read the tiny print. It said that attempting to remove it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it.
Fine, it didn’t exactly say that, but it was a weaponized security tag set to explode red dye and glass shards at any dangerous thieving criminal. It made no sense. I’d bought these pants online! They’d come to me in the mail. There had been no security clearance, yet now I was the proud owner of pants that exploded.
I quickly googled it, was this for real? Yes. Yes it was. The tag could literally explode with permanent red dye and small pieces of glass if improperly removed.
I’d traveled with blow torches and pant bombs. It seemed the gentle notes from TSA suggesting they’d had cause to rifle through my bags was my very best case scenario.
So, as I see it, if we started the new year not being arrested for flying with an arsenal, imagine the possibilities on just a normal day! Just an average day making lunches, handing out tissues, walking the dogs and keeping all weapons safely secured at home.