“Kids say the darndest things” – Art Linkletter

“Is your dad still a flight attendant?” Michelle asked my son Ryan recently.

An innocent question, but I had to chuckle. I have never been and never want to be a flight attendant. So where in the world did that question come from?

It turns out that when Ryan and Michelle were in first or second grade together, Ryan thought I was a flight attendant and told his classmates as much. Ryan knew I flew extensively, and somehow, in his little boy brain, he conjured up the picture of his dad taking care of people on airplanes.

Apparently I reinforced the myth when later I taught Michelle and Ryan and several of their friends in a Sunday School class. I would sometimes send members of that little class postcards from the more exotic locations I visited. She actually kept those cards, bless her heart!

So now, many years later, Michelle is a beatuful young woman who for years had held onto the mistaken notion of Ryan’s dad serving folks drinks in the air.

I hadn’t known of Ryan’s misception about my career until he told me this story a few days ago. Do you want to know what some of my other kids thought I did for a living?

David thought I just stayed on an airplane all week. He had seen me get on an airplane early in the week and get off the airplane at the end of the week – in those pre 9/11 days when families could accompany fliers to the gate. He just assumed that is where I stayed all week. The concept of getting off the airplane at my destination was a foreign concept.

For Holly, it was simpler. She just thought I went on a lot of vacations. She had only flown somewhere when the family went on a vacation. She just figured Dad got to go on a lot of them.

But perhaps it was Eric who pegged it best. “I want to be a computer guy like my dad,” he told his first grade class. “All he does is fly all over the place and to go meetings!”

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