And the most surprising part? By the time we landed, the young woman who’d been yelling at me was crying for an entirely different reason.
But to understand what happened, I need to start two hours earlier, with a birthday present for my granddaughter.
My granddaughter Emily was turning ten, and she lived in Phoenix with my daughter Joanne, her husband, and three energetic older brothers. Emily was the youngest and the only girl, which meant she had become very skilled at making herself heard in a house full of noisy boys.
Three weeks before her birthday, I asked what she wanted.
“Grandma,” she announced seriously, “there’s only one thing I want in the whole world.”
“And what’s that, sweetheart?”
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.”
I wrote the name down, although I had absolutely no idea what it meant.
