I mentioned in a blog Monday that I first had good thoughts upon learning my flight out of Louisville was leaving from Gate B17. That’s because it reminded of Pop since he was a ball-turret gunner in Flying Fortresses during World War II.

That was tempered when I learned I’d be flying into St. Louis for a brief layover.

When traveling to Chicago tonight en route to Louisville, I saw that my plane from Midway to Kentucky would be leaving from, you guessed it, Gate B17.

Upon landing and rushing to my gate, I learned that the flight would be about 40 minutes late, now scheduled to leave at 10:15 p.m.

Hope we don’t leave any later. It’s already been a long day, and I miss Karen and the girls.

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Check-in at the airport this morning, that is getting through the TSA screen, went rather smoothly.

I didn’t get red-lined, pink-lined or yellow-lined as in most trips since the 9-11 terror attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. In the first four or five years afterward, I felt like I was being profiled. That somewhere there were government types that had some kind of secret information that said short, fat, graying white guys would soon launch the next wave of terror against America.

How else could I explain always having my ticket defaced with a marker of one color or another and being waved to the area where belts come off, the pat downs come just shy of asking you to cough and your laptop’s memories are erased.

And of course there were the luggage searches.

You could always tell my stuff had been rummaged through. Sometimes there were even notes indicating that “yes, indeed your things have been rummaged through, and we want to make sure you know it.”

But last year, on a similar business trip to Arizona, that changed.

A fluke, I thought. After all, I am a short, fat, graying white guy who hadn’t lost much weight and who had not — and still have not — turned to Pete Rose’s friend, Grecian Forumla 16.

Could it be that all that red-lining, all those tummy pattings and all those erasing of memoories had thwarted the use of my people as weapons of terror?

I don’t know. I’m betting I’m just on a two-trip lucky streak. And I still have to get home.

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