Dead tired. Without the tired part.

Celine Sparks, 2025

I’m tired. Like the bonafide deep tired you can’t get just from a long tech rehearsal or a Richard Simmons workout video. This is airport tired. Last week I was supposed to fly in to my home airport at 11:30. I thought that was a bit ridiculous since even the local news crews are crawling into bed by then. But it’s just the way it is. It’s that last flight to Huntsville, and I end up on it. A lot. 

Eleven-thirty didn’t turn out to be so ridiculous after all. Two-forty-five-ish took the new spot for ridiculous. There was a delay and another delay. All my delays had baby delays that grew up to have more delays. So I got home from Phoenix at 3:15. I can do that. Once. I mean, come on, you’re as young as you feel.

But by now, on the second episode of this, a week later, I’m feeling as young as a Tyrannasaurus in a nursing home. I’m supposed to be on that 11:30 thing again, and it’s now 12:41 a.m., and the gate’s beginning to look like the colossal sleepover of 1983 when none of my friends could hang with it all night. People are falling over like stalkless tomato plants. We’ve all got curvature of the spine at this point.

What’s the deal with the delay? I don’t even know. Ten years ago when this happened, remember? They always told us the same thing: that the plane had a hydraulic leak. That sounded important and foreboding. Like tonsillitis or claustrophobia. Hydraulic leak. No one wants to get on a plane with one of those! Whatever it is.  So they announced it every single time.

I never knew so many planes could have hydraulic leaks. It seemed like an epidemic, and somebody should go to the airplane factory, walk up to Orville Wright, and find out what the problem is. Then, just like that, they stopped saying it.

Probably because of this one Huntsville flight. Because basically, the only person who’s on the flight who’s not a rocket scientist, is me. And you can’t pull a fast one on those Redstone boys. They’ll whip a TI-65x out of their pocket faster than a beagle can grab a dropped hot dog. And they can explain why or why not a hydraulic leak is possible, you know, based on factoring in the gravitational pull of the moon in this phase, the longitudinal distance of hydraulicism, and the curvature of everyone’s spine.

Nobody lies to these guys, so we’re sitting . . . plopping . . . falling, at this gate with no explanation whatsoever.

Fast forward. Because they finally told us to board the plane. That means the section of my life that I wrote about above came to an end. It’s now a new day, and I’ve had three hours of beauty rest. I could rival the three-colored Chinese pheasant in stunning grandeur by now. Just kidding, I meant the two-toed sloth.

I got in trouble right off the bat on the plane. The flight attendant was going on about blah-blah-blah with the people on the exit row, and I was fading fast. She got in my face, and said, “Maam, hello,” which was suddenly coming in clearer to me than the other blahs. “I need a verbal answer.”

“What was the question?”

“Are you ready, willing, and able to help other passengers in the unlikely event of an evacuation?”

“Oh. am I sitting in the exit row? Then yes. Yes to all of the above.”

Rest easy. Everyone’s in very good hands.