We had returned home late after visiting two of my cousins that I’d never met (or at least not since I was too small to remember meeting them) and we’d just finished packing. Kids were in bed, and Clorinda was finalizing some things so we could get up at 3:30 (again, I did NOT schedule the flight) to get to Harrisburg for the flight home, and Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport), being the hip company that they are, sent me a text at about 1:00 a.m. to inform me that our flight was delayed. We would now be leaving at 8:30 in the morning instead of the previously scheduled 6:00. Best text I received all night.
We finished up what we were doing, said our good-byes to Clorinda’s family, and I went to bed about 2:00. Of course, the new departure time meant that we would be leaving Harrisburg just minutes before our connection was leaving Detroit, so Clorinda decided to call Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) and confirm our connection--or some connection--was still good. I’d no sooner closed my eyes than Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) came to the same realization, so they texted me AND emailed me to say that our flight was no longer at 8:30, it was going to be at 1:30. On Thursday. Two days later. On New Years Eve.
Insert really tired sounding swear words here.
Clorinda had gotten through to Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) customer service about the same time I got downstairs to let her know of the new news, but the customer service rep had beat me to it. We spent the next two-and-a-half hours, Clorinda on the phone and me on the tablet, searching for flights into Las Vegas. Harrisburg was out of the question. Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) had nothing. Southwest? Yeah, every flight sold out. American? Don’t even ask. United suggested I fly out of DC to Newark, take a train from Newark to NYC, and then go NYC to Vegas. It would only take about 26 hours, total. Jet Blue wanted to fly me to Boston, have me spend the night, and then fly to Vegas. All for the paltry sum of $1100 per person.
Finally, I found a flight on Virgin out of DC, going to San Francisco, then on to Las Vegas, and it had five seats. Of course, by the time the Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) agent pulled it up, four of those seats had been snagged by some other stranded passenger.
Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) did offer at one point to fly us out of Dulles in DC. It was a 6:00 a.m. flight. DC is two hours from my in-laws’ house. This was after 3:00 in the morning. Not. Going. To. Work.
As luck had it, they finally found something about 4:30 in the morning. An hour after I was supposed to be getting up to head to Harrisburg. We would fly out Wednesday afternoon from DC and go through Salt Lake. Two of us (yeah, not me) will head on to Las Vegas, and the other three of us will go to St. George and drive the last hour-and-a-half to Vegas. But at least we’ll get home in time for the kids to go partying for New Years Eve. (Note: I made it home on Thursday morning, about 15 minutes past midnight.)
In 1999, I drove from Las Vegas for what I thought was the last time. I’d moved down in 1995, met Clorinda, got married, had two kids, and decided to go back to school before the kids were old enough to know we were poor. June 1999, I was on the I-15 cruising toward Provo, not even bothering to check the rearview mirror. I was leaving Las Vegas and was never coming back. The heat? They can keep it. The “adult” entertainment? Not my scene. The traffic? Almost as good as Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport). Nope, I was NOT going to miss it.
And I almost kept true to my word.
About four months after I'd left, Clorinda convinced me that I needed a plan “B” with school. Law and Order was on TV, so I said “OK, I’ll go to law school.” I had to (quickly) apply for schools, register for the LSAT (didn’t even know that was a thing) and whatever else one does to get into grad school. I applied to four schools: BYU, Utah (what?), American (something about DC), and Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, which is located in Carlisle PA--home of the Army War College and Clorinda’s parents. As it turned out, I got into BYU, so we didn’t have to move, but we were close, really close, to moving to Carlisle back in the summer of 2000.
On Tuesday, when we should have been on a plane heading to Las Vegas, we were instead driving through Carlisle to pick up a loaf of bread for Clorinda’s mom, and we drove past Dickinson. I don’t know why I have an affinity for a school that I’d never attended (although they did accept me), but I look at the school whenever I drive by and wonder “what if?”
This week was no different.
Except that it was. I started thinking on what I would have missed if I had attended Dickinson instead of BYU. Obviously, my law school friends would not even be law school acquaintances. Summer jobs would have been different—you can’t commute to Salt Lake to work for the US Attorney (for free) from Carlisle PA with quite the same convenience as from Provo. Probably would not have ended up in the Sacramento DA’s office. And I almost certainly would not have applied to clerk for Judge Adair in Las Vegas in November 2002.
That of course led me to think of all the friends I’ve made in Las Vegas in 13 years since I returned. I cannot begin to list them—I would inevitably miss many of them, and those I would remember would run for pages. I know there would be other friends, other experiences, to replace those I would have missed not being here, but I wouldn't have had the friends and experiences I gained in Provo and in Las Vegas.
Suffice it to say, little choices in life have long-lasting effect on our lives. Had I gone to Dickinson, I probably would have stayed on the East coast after graduating, raised my kids in a place of green grass, big rivers, and snowy winters (except this year). More than that, I would have driven to Carlisle for Christmas, and I would have driven home on Tuesday. Probably not at 6:00, but I certainly would not have been receiving text messages from Delta (Don’t Even Leave The Airport) in the middle of the night.
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