TRAVEL

We Only Made It Halfway Down the Runway

We never found out what went wrong but I suspect the ‘check engine’ light came on

Photo by Kevin Bosc on Unsplash

I was on a plane, seated next to my 6-year-old grandson.

“You hear that, Buddy? You hear that sound?”

You know the sound I’m talking about — that moment when you’re speeding down the runway and the engine suddenly gets much louder.

Flying with a child on his first trip feels like a glorious adventure. “It’s about to happen! You’re going to feel us fly into the air!”

But that’s not what happened. The pilot slammed on the brakes and then announced we’d be returning to the gate for never-specified reasons.

I don’t take flying for granted

I don’t fly often. I had flown exactly once in my life — way back in 1986 when planes had smoking sections — until 2004. That’s when I fell in love with a European and we began scratching together money for cheap flights. (It cost less to just get married, which we did in 2006.)

I know some people fly routinely and take it for granted, but that’s never been me. In much the same way I don’t really believe a baby can possibly emerge from a particular part of a woman’s body even…