A recent flight for vacation brought me to the waiting area for the airplane.  You’re likely familiar with the small cramped waiting room at airline gates that have room for about 30 people, but they’ve booked 120 or so for the flight.  While I sat in one of the luxurious pleather chairs, I had the good fortune to be staring at the TSA sign showing what you can and cannot take aboard a flight.  Many of these made good sense.  For example, you cannot take weapons of any kind.  I like that rule and hope that we all abide by it.  The reason for prohibiting the other items seemed less obvious.  Apparently you cannot take a car battery with you on a plane.  My first thought was that if you needed a car battery, you would likely be near your car and not an airplane.  Also, if you needed a car battery at the place you were flying to, wouldn’t you just go to the local auto parts store.  Like democracy, I believe that there are auto parts stores everywhere and that car batteries can be purchased easily.  This may not be the case all over the world, but I’m hanging on to the notion about the auto parts stores, and the availability of car batteries.

The real puzzler for me, though, was the prohibition against carrying on cleaning fluids.  First of all, flying anywhere for me is usually a vacation.  I won’t be cleaning anything. As, I’m sure, are none of the other women in my vicinity who are also traveling.  While I’m sitting in the airport waiting area, I try and pick out the men who would travel with cleaning fluids.  I’d like to know who they are.  I’ve raised one son and had a couple of husbands.  All of them expressed vehement disdain for being anywhere near cleaning solutions.  Who the hell would fly with them?

Is TSA concerned that some guy will bump into others as he boards with his matching O-Cedar Mop and Bucket?  Are they afraid that the scent of Pine-Sol would overpower the smell of their great “famous maker” coffees?  Perhaps  they worry that those seats we all sit in over and over again would finally get clean.  Truthfully, I would like to see some guy trying to wrangle bottles of cleaning solutions, a squeegee, some rags and those little yellow plastic cleaning gloves onto an airplane.  This is a man I would want to sit next too.  Worry-free, germ-free, right in the seat next to me.

An adage from my youth was that cleanliness is next to godliness.  If we have men bringing cleaning solutions onto airplanes, and those airplanes are up in the sky, I’m thinking that I’ve doubled down on the “next to godliness” part if I’ve got one of those clean freaks on the same flight as me.  Safe travels for everyone!