Taxiing

You always worry a little bit. It doesn’t make that much sense, since I haven’t flown fewer than 50,000 miles in any of the last thirteen years and I’m still here. Oh, I’ve been witness to some minor mishaps including a failed nose gear and a couple of medical emergencies. Seen people arrested in airports for reasons I couldn’t identify.

I’m a gazillion miler and I never give much thought to the various “might happen” scenaria that seem to really bother some people. Something will happen or it won’t and the odds be ever in my favor. Especially since the two times in my life when something potentially awful occurred (the afore-mentioned nose gear problem a few years ago and a smoldering restroom trash bin in [1972?]) on an aircraft that included me among its occupants, the potential was not realized due to prompt and professional action by the people who know how.  

I believe in the safety of air travel, particularly as measured against travel by automobile, for instance. And that belief, that trust, is so centered and firmly entrenched that I no longer even think about it. Not when it's me on the airplane, that is.

So someone please tell me why, when the traveler is not so much me as one of my daughters, just one word texted from that daughter’s phone shortly after she has landed in Boston allows me to relax my shoulders, turn off the flight tracker on my computer and carry on with my afternoon.

“Taxiing.”

What a great word!