I’d like to think I wasn’t one of those devil children, but one day, when I was about ten or eleven, I decided it would be “fun” to launch a papaya through a neighbor’s plate glass window. Not a very good idea, in hindsight.
Papayas were the “bomb” of choice for the boys in my southern Florida neighborhood; they were free, ubiquitous, easy to pick, and they splattered and made a big mess if you managed to nail your friend with one as he zipped by on his bike.
I had to pay my neighbor back for the repair of his window by mowing his lawn and weeding his garden every week for the next year. And every week, I had to look him in the eye, knowing what I had done.
I’ll bet Ms. Rosalinda Baez wishes she were facing a lawn mower and some garden gloves instead of six months in jail, a possession of marijuana charge and a $23,000 fee to pay jetBlue back for the cost of an emergency landing after she made a false bomb threat to the airline.
Ms. Baez, it seems, missed her jetBlue connection at JFK, en route from Costa Rica to Austin, Tex. Her luggage managed to make the connecting flight. After unsuccessfully demanding the plane return so she could retrieve her bags, reports are that she suggested to jetBlue staff there was a bomb in her luggage, forcing airline officials to declare an emergency and divert the already-airborne flight to Richmond, Va.
I never again used a papaya as a projectile after my childhood fiasco. I’ll bet Ms. Baez has learned to keep her mouth shut after hers.
