A bad airport memory, a sad queen, and America's greatest writer

I hope all of my American friends and readers had a lovely Thanksgiving and for those of you traveling for the holiday, good luck. Those storms sound very scary and there are few experiences more frustrating than being trapped at the airport. Like most people, I’ve had flights delayed due to bad weather, but my worst delay lasted 12 hours and was not weather related. We were supposed to fly to NYC from Shannon Airport in Ireland, and the plane had mechanical trouble, although the airline did not tell us that. Throughout the ordeal, they were so close-mouthed we began to suspect they were in training for jobs with M-16 or the CIA. As the hours passed, we were reduced to sitting on the floor as there were not enough seats and we could not leave for at any moment, the airline might announce the flight was ready to depart. Eventually, they dispatched another plane from Belgium, but it was not large enough for us all, and about 30 of us were still stranded. When they found a plane for us, we had to walk across the tarmac, never a good sign, and there it was, the plane that was to fly us across the Atlantic. I won’t say it was as small as the Spirt of St Louis or a crop-duster, but as we stared at it in shocked silence, the man next to me spoke for us all when he muttered, “Oh, my God.” And when we finally landed at JFK, the passengers all burst into applause. For those of you likely to have a rough trip back home, doesn’t that make you feel better? No…it wouldn’t for me, either. On to Today in History.
All of the people I write about took the day off on November 30th. But there were two non-medieval deaths worth mentioning. On November 30, 1705, Catherine of Braganza, the much put-upon queen of Charles II, died. I always felt sympathy for Catherine. Deeply pious, this convent-bred bride was never at home in England, distrusted for her Catholic faith and scorned for her inability to give Charles an heir. Charles, of course, was probably the greatest womanizer ever to sit on the English throne; sorry to deny you the laurels, Edward IV. (And yes, Henry I sired over 21 illegitimate children, but I think he cared only about the sex; the women were merely the means to an end. Whereas I think Charles and Edward genuinely liked the ladies.) Catherine had to accept the presence at his court of her husband’s favorites, which had to be painful as well as humiliating, for she seems to have developed real feeling for the charming, lusty, and good-humored man she’d married. Charles became fond of her, too, not enough to “stay faithful to his marriage bed,” as they phrased it in the MA, but enough to try to protect her from the hostility of his more rabidly anti-Catholic subjects; he also intervened whenever a royal mistress was too disrespectful of his long-suffering queen. He refused to put her aside even after it became obvious she would never give him an heir, in kindly contrast to Henry Bluebeard Tudor. Of course it could be argued that in sparing Catherine’s feelings, he did his country no favors, for England would surely have been better off without the kingship of his inept, idiot brother, James. Catherine survived Charles by twenty years, remaining in England instead of returning to Portugal. She is said to have been the one who introduced tea drinking to the British public, thus inadvertently contributing to the causes of the American Revolution—remember the Boston Tea Party, people? The New York City borough of Queens is named after her, as she was the queen at the time of its founding—or so says Wikipedia.
And on November 30th, 1910, the man I consider the greatest American writer, Mark Twain, died. His last years were filled with sorrow and bitterness and I think he was probably glad to go. RIP, Mark. I think you would be pleased to know that you are just as esteemed in our time as you were in your own.