Looking up at the right time

A new project at The Store is the trial launch of an outdoor home-and-garden center, where we'll be selling trees and bushes and flowers and mulch and plastic flamingoes and all the stuff you'd need to dispose of a dead mobster or two. If it goes well, the other Stores in Buffalo will do it next year. This is the week when we're putting the whole thing together. I haven't had much to do with it myself as of yet, but today at around 9:10 a.m. I was out there after carrying out some boxes of stuff. Then I stood and shot the breeze with the woman running the show for a few minutes.

About that time, I heard the unmistakable sound of a jumbo jet's engines on final approach. One hears this a lot in Buffalo's Southtowns, since most incoming flights to Buffalo Niagara International Airport approach from the south, but this was different. The plane was quite a bit larger than I'm used to seeing land here, and its approach path was much lower than any other plane that's ever gone over The Store. It was very different, so much so that the guy standing next to me also said, "Doesn't that plane look a little low?"

"Yeah, it does," I said, glancing around at my coworkers, who were apparently taking no notice at all of the plane. After all, as I've said, planes in descent over the Southtowns is nothing new.

But what was new was how I could make out the stripes in the American flag painted on the tail, and I could clearly see the rather distinctive blue-and-white hull markings. And then I suddenly remembered the big news story in Buffalo over the last few days, and I realized that the plane I was watching as it made its slow, final approach was this plane.

I may be no fan of that plane's most important passenger, but still, as an American, there are few thrills to compare with walking outside one's workplace, looking up into the sky, and seeing Air Force One in slow descent. Today, the President of the United States flew over my head.

And only I and the guy standing next to me, out of perhaps fifty people in the parking lot, realized it.