This week, I had to take a business trip to Ottawa. Airline travel from Windsor, Ontario to just about anywhere for business purposes can be frustrating, it used to be much simpler and less expensive, believe it or not to drive across to Detroit International Airport and fly back into Canada. Things being as they are, we had to fly out Tuesday morning for a Wednesday meeting - into Toronto for a brief stop and then off to our nation's capital, with the earliest return flights being after 6pm. Needless to say, I wanted to be prepared with some distractions during each of the 45 minute plane-hops... Windsor to Toronto; Toronto to Ottawa; Ottawa to Toronto; Toronto to Windsor, so I decided I'd finish my downloaded copy of "Where the Red Fern Grows".
I have read the first few chapters of this book several times to groups of Cub Scouts who can't sleep at camp and to both my kids when they were little. I had always left off sometime after the boy proudly brings his new puppies home from his Grandfather's store. This time, I had left it bookmarked in the chapter just before the grandfather takes a bet with the Pritchard boys (no spoilers here, if you're worried).
Well, I had forgotten what an excellent book this was and found myself, a generally stoic and unemotional sort to be barely restraining physical expressions of feelings that I hadn't felt so strongly in a good long time. By the conclusion of the championship coon hunt chapters, something altogether unexpected happened... two big, fat tears welled up behind my reading glasses and rolled down my face. I was certain that the young lady beside me had seen, so I cleared my throat in the manliest fashion I could manage and flipped the screen over to a digital woodworking magazine in hopes she would think I was remembering some sort of sawdust to eye injury in my mysterious and tear free past. But this, was not to be my ultimate shame...
After several hours of delays and a real possibility that we'd be spending an evening in Ottawa, we finally boarded our plane to Toronto with confirmation that we would also get a flight the rest of the way home. It was here that I read through those final chapters. Once again sitting beside a young, professional looking woman (of course), My body suddenly and uncontrollably lurched from a deep, racking sob that welled up from my soul LOL. She started at the sudden movement and then looked at me with sympathy, probably thinking I had just gotten some sort of tragic news. Not wanting to show any cracks in my warrior's facade, I harrumphed like an old man who sees neighbor kids on his front lawn, straightened my glasses and started reading about table saw tenon jigs. I also made sure to sniffle just enough to let on that there were "allergens" circulating in that airplane air...
