In today’s episode of The Highlight Real: Let’s talk about early flights.

I’m not talking about early in the normal human sense, where you set an alarm for 6am and go about your day.  I’m talking about the flights that leave so early you can’t decide whether to go to bed and get up at an ungodly hour, or just stay up all night and mainline coffee until it’s time to leave. Either way, you arrive at the airport feeling like absolute death – shuffling through security in the pre-dawn dark, making eye contact with nobody, just going through the motions.

And then you get to the jetway.

The jetway is the place where you stand slightly too close to strangers, in a line that isn’t moving, while collectively pretending that you are literally anywhere else on Earth. Nobody talks. Nobody makes eye contact. Everyone is in their respective alone-cones.

On one particular butt-crack-of-dawn departure – and I want to be precise here, because butt-crack-of-dawn is the only accurate term for this time of day – we were doing our jetway shuffle when I noticed a couple ahead of us with a small child. The child looked like he was about two years old. And he was, to use the technical parenting term, losing his mind.

This kid was DONE. Not a little fussy. Not having a moment. DONE. He was expressing his feelings about the situation with the full-throated conviction of someone who has not yet learned that society expects you to suffer in silence. He was, frankly, doing what every single adult in that jetway wanted to do but couldn’t.

His father looked down at him.

Now, at this point, you might expect a parent to try any number of standard-issue toddler-management techniques – bribery, distraction, pleading. Instead, this man – this absolute legend, this philosopher-king of early morning air travel – looked at his son with the calm, unbothered energy of someone who had long ago made his peace with the universe, and said:

“Shhhhhhhh, little dude. You’re harshing everyone’s mellow.”

I do not know this man’s name. I will never see him again. But I want him to know that he has permanently enriched our family’s vocabulary. We have used this phrase no fewer than four hundred times. It applies to virtually every situation: traffic jams, bad weather, delayed flights, overly enthusiastic tour guides, fellow cruise passengers who have not stopped talking since we sat down on the herd bus at 7:30am and whom I will refer to only as, The Babblefish.

When life gets loud, we invoke the little dude.

Cheers!