Riding in Airplanes with Babies

It is possible. I will even go so far as to say that it is possible with a 15-month-old, while you are seven months pregnant. But it is not fun. Especially if the plane is small, you have a large person seated next to you, and the flight is longer than two hours, which mine thankfully was not.

The purpose of this flight was to see my aging grandparents, show them their great-grandson, and go to Mass with them just once--as a fellow Catholic--before they die. As far as I know, I am the only Catholic, besides them, in the family. Each of their five children has gone his separate way and, I presume, the grandchildren have followed suit. I find it amazing that, in my own life, the Church has exercised a pull on me despite my having been alienated from these grandparents at an early age, and despite my own anti-Catholic father's attempts to estrange me from them and trash the Church. This trip was my attempt to communicate that at least one branch of their descendants has gone home to Rome.

While we have never been close, they seemed to get the message. Grandma's enthusiasm was palpable as she handed me a small box and said, "Here's a rosary, in case you don't already have one," and showed me some of her treasured religious objects, like an old wooden crucifix she bought in the forties. Grandpa showed me his rosary and gave me a blessed medal to put on mine. In twenty years of knowing these people, they have never shared anything truly personal with me. I felt that coming down at this time had been the right thing to do.

We attended Mass at the huge old church that was down the street from their house. St. Mary's was built around 1956, a spanish-style church with a bell tower, and sprawling school buildings that once handled the bustling parish that was, but which now stand empty. The priest still says daily and Saturday Mass as well as Sundays, but he now splits his time between the Taft and Buttonwillow parishes. The Saturday Mass, moreover, was in Spanish, in order to accomodate the town's growing Hispanic population. Following it was like trying to follow a football game in three different languages. If you know enough about football, however, you can follow the game anyway. I soon gave up on trying to flip back and forth between the Spanish and English translations in the missal, and only got lost a couple more times. The inside of the church itself was that perfect marriage between detail and simplicity, and I hope it stands for a long time to come--even if all the Masses are in Spanish.

Religious strife between me and my mom and sister was kept to a minimum. My sister, a sometime Seventh-Day Adventist churchgoer, witnessed to me in good Christian fashion about how her faith had transformed her life and she couldn't do anything without Jesus. I affirmed this generic Christianity without committing myself to any particular doctrines. To do so would only have been to open a huge can of worms with my sister, who is not up to discussing religion rationally and doesn't know how to limit her comments. Mom told me later that my sister knows I'm a Catholic, but that she doesn't understand why I would do that, because "Catholics worship Mary." I told Mom that at least I had gone to the trouble to learn enough about her religion to know it was not a cult, and so the least she could do for me is investigate Catholicism enough to discover that those old canards that are so widespread simply aren't true. I did not muster the courage to confront my sister on this issue, however.

Which brings me back to airplanes and the joy of coming home. I'm glad I went, but I paid a price in suffering for this trip. I was pushed to my limit physically, with the lack of rest, and so committed sins of uncharity and impatience that I will have to admit in the confessional. However, I found myself again experiencing the power of God leading me to do and say "the right thing" many more times than I would have had I not been regularly receiving our Lord in the Eucharist. This is the grace of God, which is not my doing, so I cannot boast.