Free Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer by Marsha Marks Page A

closet.”
    I looked in the extra luggage closet. It was three feet deep and nineteen inches wide, and I thought,
I can fit in here
. I got in, spread a blanket on the floor, and slept soundly for the three hours and eighteen minutes until descent.
    So, if you were one of the passengers on the flight that day who went to use the First Class bathroom but opened the wrong door instead, it was me you saw. Me on the floor, using my coat for a pillow, sleeping in the closet.

C HAPTER 31
     

     

Stupid Dad Tricks
     
    S ometimes when my family wants to get away for a mini-vacation, Tom will ask me to look for a trip that has a long layover and open flights, and Tom and Mandy will come with me. Last summer I found just such a trip—a thirty-hour layover in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was on that trip that Tom did what he now refers to as a Stupid Dad Trick.
    It wasn’t that Tom meant to do anything that would be classified as not smart. He had only the best intentions in mind as he tried to teach our seven-year-old daughter, Mandy, to do backward flips into the hotel pool. Tom later said he didn’tnotice the sharp aluminum edging around the pool or how far the concrete gutters stuck out into the water.
    As a testament to Tom’s teaching ability—or Mandy’s learning ability—she did get a lot of height on her spin. And flip. In fact, she was completely upside down when she crashed. Which would have been good if she’d been over water. She wasn’t.
    She hit the side of the pool with the top of her head, slicing a straight line across the top of her skull. As she continued down, now propelled to the edge of the water, her forehead slammed into the concrete edging.
    Let me tell you right now, Mandy survived with no brain damage. And no permanent scarring, except for the scar across the top of her skull, which is mostly hidden by her hair.
    As we describe the accident now to friends and family who weren’t there to watch, we like to say, “She didn’t bleed that much. They only had to drain the pool twice.”
    We actually don’t know how many times they drained the pool because, as soon Tom saw the cut on the top of Mandy’s head and the blood running down her face, he raced her upstairs to the room, where I was quietly writing another chapter about our chaotic life. He needed my help in deciding what hospital in this unfamiliar city would be best to stitch up the gash in a seven-year-old’s head.
    Later that evening, when everything was calm, Tom mournfully said, “I’m so sorry. I feel terrible.”
    “It was an accident,” I said. “It could have happened to anyone.”
    “You would never have allowed her to jump backward off a hotel pool,” he said. “It was a Stupid Dad Trick.”
    I wanted to say, “You’re right on the first and second points,” but since I’ve done a few well-meaning dumb things myself, I was in no place to judge. So I just said, “Thank God it wasn’t worse. I mean, she could have broken her neck or her nose or had brain damage.”
    On my next trip as a flight attendant, I was still so stunned by the accident—more stunned by what could have happened and didn’t—that I felt the need to talk about the incident. I told the flight attendant sitting with me in the back of the plane the whole story.
    “Oh, that’s nothing,” she said. “Listen to what my husband did on his Stupid Dad Trick day.”
    Apparently she had been on a long layover at a Miami hotel, and her husband had come to visit her and brought their three-month-old daughter. Mom was in the room resting, and Dad decided to take Baby to the pool. Not wanting Baby to get any sun damage, the Dad had greased her all over with a thick coating of SPF 45 sunscreen. Then they got in the pool. That’s when Dad realized Baby was slippery. So slippery that she popped out of his grip, and when he tried to capture her, he couldn’t.
    “It was like trying to catch a greased watermelon,” he said. Dad said he tried at least