Air Show Attraction

As of this week, my husband has been in the Air Force for thirteen years. Sometimes that sounds like forever, and sometimes it sounds like just a drop in the bucket. But Air Show weekend has arrived and it is making me feel quite old.

If you include the four years I worked on an Air Force base before I married a military man, that means I have been attending air shows for seventeen years. You can subtract out a year for the post-9/11 cancellation, but you can probably add back quite a bit of time for the year we lived right near the Blue Angels practice area in Pensacola. (And I mean right near. I used to have to rehang all my pictures every Tuesday morning after they practiced.)

Seventeen is a lot of Air Shows to see. I used to be very excited every year. There is just something about the roar of the jets that is exhilarating. But then I had kids, and I had things to do on Air Show weekend that didn't involve the Air Show and it just got to be...a pain.

We feel trapped in our home on Air Show weekend. The traffic on base is so bad and it is just hard to get anywhere. My family would like to take me out for breakfast on Mother's Day tomorrow, but it is just too hard to take a left-hand turn out of our street.

But still. I hear those jets zooming over my house and my heart races. That noise, that feel just induces feelings of patriotism. I love airplanes. I love our life. It all goes together.

So we'll spend the majority of tomorrow hanging out in the home I should be cleaning and packing. We'll probably walk over to the flight line at some point, if the weather is nice. We'll probably also complain a hundred times about the traffic and the congestion.

But it is worth it. For the people of Shreveport/Bossier to get excited about our military and the people who keep our military running, it is worth it. If other people can experience that feeling I do, I'll manage a weekend of inconvenience.