A Long Day at the Airport

Jamie

June 9

June 9th
The sailors (there were men and women graduates) all had gotten their assignments. Some were going straight to ships. Others who'd qualified for various other things—like submarine school—would be going there next. Jesse was on his way to the Navy's music "A school" in Norfolk for potentially six months.* All or most of these folks were going to be flying out of O'Hare at some point on Saturday, so they were roused early, put on a bus, and driven to the airport to wait.

Jesse and his fellow sailors had been there at 4:00am. Yep. Katie and I got up at the crack of dawn, too, but not that early! We got to O'Hare at 6:15, rushed to find Jesse, and spent every moment we could with our beloved sailor.

Jesse's flight was supposed to take off around 9:30am. Then the departure changed several times. Then his flight was cancelled around noon and rescheduled to 6:08pm! (Thunderstorms in Chicagoland that day had resulted in dozens of delayed and cancelled flights.) So we sat close and talked. And sat. And walked. And ate airport food. And got mad at the TSC folks who kept making us take a very long way around to the ladies' room and weren't nice about it.

It was a long day, and tears were shed. Finally, though, Jesse was on a plane and we were on our way back to the hotel. We'd drive home to Tennessee on Sunday morning.

*The Navy's official music school trains both Navy personnel and Marines; the former tend to be musicians with college degrees (in Jesse's case, a master's, not to mention three years traveling in a brass quintet) while the latter tend to be kids right out of high school who may need some additional performance instruction, as well as life instruction. It was in a class on how to handle a checking account—Jesse had had one since middle school, because I'd given him that sort of life instruction—that the instructor took a second, closer look at Jesse's records and realized he should be able to go on to his first assignment. So Jesse was "clepped out" literally within the first couple weeks, but it took the Navy's paperwork several more weeks to turn him loose to that first assignment in beautiful, beautiful Rhode Island.