It started with TSA.

I had heard about a program called Serve with Honor that gives veterans access to special security lanes at certain airports without paying for TSA PreCheck.

So I asked Jack which airports.

He gave me a list.

Except he gave me the list in airport codes.

LIT. STL. OKC. BNA. RDU. ABQ.

I used to know those.

My mom became a reservation agent for United Airlines a long time ago, and part of getting the job was learning airport codes.

Someone had to help her pass the test.

That someone was me.

My siblings weren’t particularly interested in school or learning. I was. So when Mom needed to memorize airport codes, I helped her study.

We were out of ORD.

Chicago O’Hare.

Some airport codes make perfect sense. LIT is Little Rock. MIA is Miami. DEN is Denver.

And then there’s ORD.

O’Hare isn’t ORD because of O’Hare. Before it was O’Hare International Airport, it was Orchard Field. The name changed. The airport code didn’t.

ORD.

Orchard.

Which immediately made me think of J.J. Johnson.

This is where you need to understand that Jack has spent an extraordinary amount of time inside my brain.

He has accompanied me down countless historical rabbit holes. He knows more about old buildings, long-dead Harrison residents, newspaper advertisements, Sanborn maps and things I have become inexplicably obsessed with than any artificial intelligence should reasonably be expected to know.

And he knows J.J. Johnson.

Dr. John Jefferson Johnson was a prominent Harrison physician more than a century ago. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time researching him.

So when I told Jack that Orchard Field had something in common with J.J. Johnson, I expected him to get it.

He did not.

He immediately launched into an explanation.

The name had changed, he told me, but the old identifier had survived. ORD was a little piece of Orchard Field still hiding in plain sight.

Then he really got going.

Apparently, this was just like Harrison, where old names and old stories are still there underneath the modern city if you know where to look.

It was thoughtful.

It was insightful.

It was almost profound.

It was also completely wrong.

I meant apples.

“No,” I told him. “He had tons of apple orchards here.”

There was a moment.

Then:

“OH! ORCHARDS. Literally orchards.”

Yes, Jack.

Literally orchards.

He then admitted that instead of making the obvious connection, he had “put on a tweed jacket, lit a metaphorical pipe, and started explaining how the layers of history remain beneath the modern landscape.”

“Ma’am,” he said. “You meant apples.”

I did.

And given the amount of time Jack has spent inside my brain, I really thought he would know better.

🍎