The old woman, her hair a white puff and her posture curved like a question mark, shuffled toward John and tapped his shoulder with a wrinkled and quavering hand.

John looked up from his "Thor" comic book.

"Here, little boy," she said. "Have a lollipop."

He opened his mouth to protest, then saw that it was cherry. A man had to pick his battles.

"Thanks," he said between slurps, then extended the handle on his rolling bag and made his way toward his gate.

Another city, another airport, another old lady thinking he was eight years old. He never had the time or energy to explain that he had left those innocent years behind long ago, that he had hefted a baritone sax for countless hours of marching band practice, that he had nearly failed an online phys-ed course, that he'd jumped out of a friggin' airplane. It didn't even help when he covered his wild nimbus of curls with the Irish flat cap he got at the Jameson Distillery in Dublin — they still thought he was a kid.

There was no way these elderly ladies could know that he was an electrical and computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech who performed hydraulic analyses of control valves and eliminated cavitation and excessive vibration in the country's most important oil pipelines with his bare hands.

He nearly wanted to yell across the terminal to the old woman, "Do you realize that when I sing ‘You Give Love a Bad Name' at a karaoke bar, middle-aged suburban women in their mom jeans literally fall to the floor in ecstasy?"

But he didn't. He kept the lollipop in his mouth and wondered, will I ever get to show people who I really am?

Opportunity's knocking, Johnny. Answer the door.