My luggage went to Tampa on Saturday. I stayed home. It was a small price to pay to avoid flying again, which I rate right up there with root canals and speeches by Al Gore.

My flying experience consists of two trans-Atlantic trips with a total of perhaps 25 hours in the air. For each second of that time, I sat sweating and terrified, buckled into my seat. I never stood up, never went to the bathroom. I hate people who can stand or walk around, knowing that the shift in weight could throw the plane into an irreversible tailspin. If I read a book, I retain nothing. If I watch a movie, I remember nothing.

I am the world’s champion in fear of flying. My hands sweat when I watch a MOVIE about flying. I love watching planes take off and land. I just don’t want to be in them. I have successfully avoided flying for 13 years and am mystified by people who can do it with no ill effects.

I know all of the statistics. I know flying is much safer than driving the 1,500 miles to Florida, which I have been doing the past five or six years. The trip is my annual celebration of the end of another cruel Maine winter and the start of another pathetic Red Sox season with spring training in Fort Myers. Two days down. Two days back.

This was the year to conquer my silly fear and fly to Florida. My girlfriend, Blue-Eyed Susan, actually had a week off, one of 20 owed to her by her merciless employer. She is dreadfully organized. If she had organized D-Day, World War II would have ended a year earlier. She had no intention of spending four days in a car (with me, no less) even if it meant five or six days on the beach at Fort Myers.

She was willing to attend a few ballgames (not her favorite thing), but driving was too high a price to pay. She, naturally, had saved the money in a vacation savings account she forced me to join, and we made the airline reservations.

Who did I think I was?

I actually thought I could do it. The Wednesday before the flight I was cocky enough to watch a television report on the 1994 USAir crash in Pittsburgh which killed 132. The reporter just had to tell us that no human remains larger than a fingernail were found after the crash. We were flying USAir, naturally. My roommate yelled from another room, “Turn that off, you idiot.” But I just had to sit there, absorbing every detail of the rudder problems and the horrible details of the crash.

All of the details came back to me as we were taking the shuttle bus from Foxboro, Mass., to Logan Airport on Saturday. My hands were already sweating like I was in a sauna. “Feel my hands,” I said to Blue Eyes. “I’ll pass,” she said. I thought about the Pittsburgh fingernails.

We arrived at Logan several hours before the flight, so early the pilot was still in bed. That gave me plenty of time to sit around, thinking. I had decided to avoid drinking as a crutch, since it didn’t do a damned thing anyway. I did have a prescription for 20 Valiums provided by my personal flying psychiatrist. I was only going to use them in an emergency.

Who did I think I was?

As the time got closer and closer, I warned Blue Eyes. “I don’t think I can do this.” I popped a Valium with an hour left before the flight. I should have taken all 20. The plane landed from Tampa. It looked exactly like the one in the Pittsburgh fingernail report. It was way too small, nothing like the wide-body Aer Lingus jets I had flown in, with their comforting shamrock on the tail and a few dozen nuns in the seats.

No shamrocks. No nuns.

I walked over to the exit ramp to watch the departing, tanned customers from Florida. Half of them were smiling children dressed in Mickey Mouse regalia fresh from Walt Disney World. Flying didn’t seem to bother them. Why was I cursed? If they could do it, I could, damn it.

I walked slowly into the plane, step by step. I felt like James Cagney walking to the electric chair. I crossed the threshold from ramp to plane.

Wait a minute. This was WAY too small. It looked like an SAD 5 school bus with wings. I was not going to sit in this tin coffin screaming through the sky for three hours and 15 minutes. I wasn’t going to sit in it for one minute. Blue Eyes was already buckled in. I thought about the old Shelley Berman line that airline customers would rather die than make an ass of themselves. I chose making an ass of myself.

“I can’t do this,” I said standing up, pushing through some celebrating college students heading for spring break and past a pregnant flight attendant, if memory serves.

It wasn’t pretty.

I knew that the price would be stern disapproval from Blue Eyes and inevitable abuse from my circle of friends who could put a North Korean torture team to shame.

I did not care.

Few feelings could compare to walking back up the ramp to wonderful Logan Airport. I went to the baggage section to try to retrieve the luggage. Cowards have no scruples. I told the clerk that Blue Eyes had freaked out and got off the plane. She was not amused. “I did not! He did, the big sissy,” she yelled loud enough for the pilot to hear.

That was just the start of the abuse.

My 90-year-old mother called me a sissy, too.

My recon Marine roommate now calls me “Orville.”

Blue Eyes now calls me “Chuck,” as in Yeager.

My bed-wetting psychiatrist, Frank, calls me “The Red Baron.”

Big John sings “Wild Blue Yonder” into my answering machine.

I don’t care. I didn’t have to fly. I don’t ever have to fly again. I don’t know where I will send my bags next year. Maybe Australia. They might like that.

Just as long as I don’t have to go with them.

Emmet Meara is a veteran reporter who covers the State House in Augusta.