God Bless America

I just few home for Christmas. My flight from New Orleans went through Dallas, where I changed planes onto a massive jumbo jet in which people from everywhere converged to fly to San Francisco.  The flight was teeming with people, I was with Shih Tzu, and as luck would have it, I was crammed into the second to last row (row 43 to be exact).  Call me crazy, but American Airlines seems to have made the seats even closer together which I soon found out after the man in front of me reclined his seat and, although inducing clostrophobia, then served as a convenient  head rest for me. The flight attendants were perhaps the bitchiest and snippiest I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. I had the chills and felt as if I was coming down with a cold. And my seat was right next to the lavatory. The flight was miserable. Having decent foresight, I had downloaded an Agatha Christie book onto my i-pod and attempted to escape into my 1915 London crime drama. When I finally arrived in San Francisco, I deplaned and met my mom at the baggage claim and was immediately rewarded for my hell-flight with a sighting of perhaps the cutest man in uniform EVER.  When I finally liberated my Shih Tzu from the confines of his sherpa carrier, I turned around and was greeted by a friendly voice: "Oh my gosh, that is the cutest dog! What kind of dog is he?!" The voice came with an adorable smile and a very hot man dressed in his Navy dress blues. I don't know if I was overcome by the fact that I had encountered the first nice person since leaving New Orleans several hours earlier, or if I was overcome by the dimpled-smile and general hotness of the tall, dark, and handsome uniformed man in front of me, but I was a little bit rattled and I wasn't the only one so entranced.  My mom was transfixed as well because she started asking the sailor where he was going, where he was stationed, how long he had been there, wished him a merry Christmas and a safe return.  Then I found myself in the middle of a detailed conversation about the sailor's hopes to be re-stationed to San Diego, which is where I went to college and where my half-brother was stationed as a Navy SEAL for over ten years, so naturally I had a lot of input on the subject.  If I was single, I would have wrapped him up in a bow and gotten him for myself for Christmas.  However, I would have had to go to the mattresses against my mother because she also had the same idea.  After the sailor wished my mother, my Shih Tzu and me a very merry Christmas and politely absented himself to collect his C-bag from the turnstile, I heard my mom  say, "Whoa. If only I were your age." And in the blink of an eye, I had snapped out of my trance, and happily recalled that I was indeed married to a wonderful (albeit un-uniformed) guy.  And so I am left with the recollection of a friendly smile after the world's worst flight and a renewed appreciation for the fact that our military service men (and women) not only risk their lives in an underpaying job for the sake of our freedom, they look damn good while doing it. God bless America, and especially our troops who can't come back to the states to spend time with their families this Christmas.