Sieze el Día

Grace and Emma want to sit together on our flight to Los Angeles.  We are flying standby on an earlier flight, the snowstorm brewing in Denver concerning me.  This is not a trip we can delay as we have our appointments at the Spanish consulate early the next morning to apply for our Spanish visas.  We have two seats together and two others apart.  We decided to put the girls together; they love the idea!

I am sitting a row in front of them.  Perhaps it doesn’t initially cross my mind to ask the gentleman in their aisle seat to switch because I am so excited about my book being my flight companion.  What was I thinking?!  I wasn’t that they weren’t being good; they actually were fairly perfect, seasoned travelers, my five and nine-year-olds.  The businessman next to them in the aisle was a little older than me, a parent of kids himself he told me when we deplaned.  I had initially left the girls to their own devices, my nose already deep in my book, so the gentleman may have thought they were traveling alone.  I hear him ask, “Are you from California or Colorado?”  Emma politely responds, “We live in Colorado.”  Grace jumps in, “But she was born in California!  I was born in Colorado.”  Man, “So you’re going to California for a visit.”  Emma, “We’re going to get our visas… because we’re moving.”  Man, confused, “Visas?  Where are you moving?”  Emma, nonchalently, politely, as if it happens every day, “to Spain.”  He ponders.  Grace pipes up, “But we’re going to Disneyland first.”