It's amazing what you find on the Web
these days. You can literately piece together a timeline of your
life, put it together and you can end up with a virtual
Autobiography. I don't even know how I stumbled on this article,
but somehow I did. Once upon a time in May of 1989 I took a flight
home with my team after wrapping up a week at a national tournament
in Tyler, Tx. An hour before the flight we were gorging on chicken
fried steaks, 2+ hours after the flight we were over the straits of
Florida sweating and shitting it out.
I don't really know if I can compare
what those poor passengers felt on the hijacked planes during 911
with my own experience on this flight, but I'm sure there were a few
things that raced through their minds. Here were mine:
- Please, I don't care if you shoot and put holes into the plane. Just don't shoot the pilot.
- This real life drama is nothing like the movies
- I actually don't mind if we land in Cuba, I just don't want to crash in shark infested waters
- I sat way back at the end of the plane. I really didn't see much of the hijacker let alone the gun.
- I don't recall any mention during the flight of running out of fuel, only later after we landed. If I had known this, I would have really shit out that chicken fried steak in bucket loads.
- Why the fuck is it called a 'starter pistol'?
No, I didn't see my life flash before
my eyes. There really wasn't much drama, I'm even sad to say I wasn't
a hero in my own story like I usually am. There was a worry though
that I haven't quite experienced since. This was a decade before we
knew what real terrorists were capable of. Had this happened today
with a suicide bomber, or in Europe or the Middle East, I doubt I'd
be alive writing about it.
When I arrived home after a 2 hour
delay, my folks picked me up at the airport. Driving home they asked
me what the delay was all about. I made up some BS story. We went
to eat at a Flanagans to celebrate the awesome time I had in Texas.
There were TV screens everywhere with the hijacking on the news. I
watched my folks reaction never uttering a word. I barely touched
the rack of baby back ribs on my plate. My folks immediately knew
this was unusual because I eat the bones off the ribs when I'm
normal. When they asked me if I was ok and why I wasnt eating I
just remember saying: “I'm just glad to be home, I guess I just
had too many nuts on the plane, get me a doggybag and I'll nuke and
eat it later” To this day they never knew I was on a hijacked
plane, So if anyone ever wondered why the flights of 911 affected
me. I can only say I have my reasons.
