Periodically, my company flies me back east to attend training classes so our Southern California headquarters can stay current with the trends and legal decisions affecting Human Resources. It had been a long week and I was grateful to get out a little early and took a cab to the airport. As the rest of my fellow travelers began filling up the seats, I buckled my seatbelt and opened my quick-read paperback.

I had trouble concentrating on the story because there was a young twenty-something male behind me talking at full volume on his cell phone. “Yeah, the seat next to me is empty…yeah, and there’s this blonde babe in line behind me…of course, I’m hoping she’ll sit … OH, MY GOD!” My head jerked to attention to see what was wrong because the airplane had suddenly turned silent.

Walking down the aisle were…three, eight, ten, no, fifteen…nuns smiling at us courteously as they looked for their seats. The tone of the entire airplane population shifted from the usual grumbling and shifting into seats as we stared at them talking softly to each other in what sounded like a Spanish dialect. All the nuns walking down the aisle were under 5’ tall, dressed in white habits and white starched hats that swooped out and curled up on the sides. It looked like twenty flying-nuns had entered the plane.

The last thing I heard from the man behind me was a softly stated, “Well, we don’t have to worry about this plane going down.”

Bambii
Long Beach, California