WHEN WISHES COME TRUE

Just before Christmas I wished that my father could be a spectator at the Ford world Championship of Curling. He likes curling. But wishes don’t just simply come true. You have to work at them. So I helped to buy him a ticket.

Once the ticket was bought, I wished he would not have to go alone. And so I agreed to join him, even though I knew I would be tired from my trip to New York.

When I was in New York, I wished I would not have to attend the Ford world Championship of Curling so soon after getting home. But that was just idle wishing.

The weather in Newark NJ was fine and sunny, but Air Canada’s planes remained elsewhere, unable to land on the crowded runways. Hours later, when darkness had fallen, and other airlines were putting their planes to bed, and the restaurant and the magazine stand and the snack bar had all closed for the night, a plane found an opening and landed. It whisked us off to Toronto, where the normally buzzing airport was shrouded in the deep night’s silence that falls only when all connecting flights have long since departed. So they put us on a shuttle and sent us to a hotel, and woke us early for the first morning flight, which arrived when it was too late to go to the Ford world Championship of Curling.

Sometimes we think we are alone when, in fact, others are acting with us. It seems I am not the only one who acts upon my wishes. I never imagined that Air Canada was so serious about wish fulfillment. Even though they bumped me up to Executive Class, and gave me a pillow, and a seat that could recline without disturbing the passengers behind, and served me orange juice in stemware glasses, and poured coffee in a china mug for me at a time when they said it was too turbulent to serve hot beverages to the Economy passengers, and offered me melon and pineapple on skewers amid luscious strawberries and bunches of delicious grapes, and let me get off first, and took my luggage off first, I hope, in future, to be more careful with my wishing.