Life is a series of moments — some good, some bad, some funny & some too long

by James Norton

For the past several years, I would go out to where my kids live with their mother and pick them up to come back to Somerville to stay with me and my family for the summer. Other than our usual visit between Thanksgiving and Christmas to see them, this is the only fairly long period of time I get to spend with the kids. I work a lot and they’re both in school and have their own lives on the Air Force base in Missouri, so trying to spend quality time with 1100 miles between us and over a phone line is not the most rewarding experience for us as a family unit.

This year, my trip to pick them up was different for a number of reasons I don’t need to go into—other than to say that instead of Missouri, I had to travel much further to Colorado Springs. This was just last Friday, but it will forever remain to me as “the longest day of my life.”

It started at 4:20a.m.—my wife and I running around the house like lunatics trying to wake up and get to the airport for my flight at 5:50 a.m. We rolled up to the Delta terminal at 5:20 a.m.—and the look on the face of the woman behind the counter should have given me a clue that I was in for a long day. The nice lady and a coworker scrambled to make sure I had a seat on my flight, because they usually release all seats at 30 minutes before takeoff if you haven’t checked in. The only thing that saved me was that I had purchased a first class ticket and I am also a Delta SkyMiles member. They printed my boarding pass and sent me running—literally—for the security checkpoint to get me to the gate.

I turned the corner to head down towards the gate and ran into a backup at security which had what seemed like thousands of people waiting to go through the metal detectors. I panicked. Now its 5:45 a.m. and I have been put near the front of the line—but it seemed like everyone wearing shoes with metal rods in them was right in front of me.

I stripped off my shoes, threw them with my briefcase and my wallet into the tub, ran through the machine and took off like the wind towards my gate— the furthest gate of course—where I could see them locking the door to the jet way. Now, I used to be a fairly adroit man in my day —I played a lot of basketball, volleyball and golf—but I carry some extra weight these days and running just doesn’t agree with me. But there I was—charging through the terminal like a madman at 5:50 a.m. trying to breathe, stay vertical and in control of my body mass and yell loud enough for the nice lady locking the door to “hold that plane!”. It had to have been a funny sight.

They unlocked the door, told the plane to open the door and let me on. Thank God. The first class seat helped me recover nicely, and away I went towards the Rocky Mountains.

Two times zones and I am not quite sure how many miles later, I was in Colorado Springs waiting for my ex-wife and the kids. I looked at my watch and didn’t think anything of it—it was noon and she was going to be there at 1:00 p.m. I decided to just hang out at the airport and wait the hour.

Then it hit me. I didn’t turn the watch back the two time zones. It was actually 10:00 a.m. locally, I had traveled for five hours and I had to wait for three hours before the kids would meet me and another hour after that before the flight left at 2:00 p.m. There was no way I would make it through the rest of day—we weren’t scheduled to land in Boston until 10:30 p.m. I knew I had no options though, because we were to leave for Cape Cod the following morning for a week long vacation together with the rest of my family.

By the time we began the last leg of the journey from Milwaukee to Boston, I was so tired that I was totally wired. It was only fitting that the three of us were sitting together—in the very last row of the plane—and one of the seven computers that control the plane failed while we on the runway waiting to takeoff. An hour and fifteen minutes and a brand new computer later, we took off—and landed in Boston at 11:35p.m. We got the kids’ bags and walked in the door at our home at 12:20 a.m. Do the math—that’s 20 hours of plane riding, waiting for kids, waiting for flights, running to catch flights, blood pressure off the wall and tired as hell. But the kids are here and life is great, even after the longest day of my life—another one for the memory banks.