Lost Connections - Reflections on Flying
05/21/2025
I am fascinated by airplanes. I am amazed that all that metal and all that weight can even take off the ground. Whenever I fly, I am simultaneously overjoyed, nervous, slightly petrified, and full of wonder.
On most planes, the seats are so narrow that we are sardines packed tightly, shoulder to shoulder. Our arms briefly bump our neighbors when we try to adjust our shoulders or take something out of our bags.
I am flying again and I rub my eyes, dried out by the air whooshing at my head from only two feet away, and I knock my Kindle up into the air. It bounces off my arm and onto the man next to me and then lands between his legs. His legs have been spread the whole flight and his knee is in my personal leg space, but being me, I ignore it and adjust. He is napping, until he is assaulted by my Starry Night-covered Kindle. He looks at me like I’m crazy and slowly looks between his legs and retrieves it. I laugh nervously and apologize, but he says nothing. He has said nothing the whole trip. Same for the woman on my other side, except when she orders a “Coke, with no ice,” which she says with a concerned voice. I wonder what she will do if the host brings her a Coke with ice. Will she drink it as-is anyway, like I would, or squeak out a “no ice”?
My arms are tightly bound to my sides now, and I’m trying even harder not to touch my compatriots in the air. We sit closer than I do to any of my friends or family on any given day, yet we do not even acknowledge each other’s nearness or humanness.
I remember another flight where I sat next to to a woman who pulled out a little plastic game with pegs on it and asked me if I wanted to play. Being an introvert at heart, and wanting to read my book, I politely declined, saying I was sorry. She said, “That’s okay,” and played on her own.
Once the plane was in flight, the seatbelt signs off, another woman approached her, giddy, and asked her, “Aren’t you that famous comedian on that NPR quiz show.”
She laughed and said in a cheerful yet slurred voice that she was. Yikes, I recognized her suddenly, but being who I am, said nothing.
As I write about this typing on my phone, hoping my seat mates don’t glance over to see that I am writing about them, I think about the possible interesting conversations I could have shared with the comedian, seemingly encouraged by her invitation to play, or anyone in such close proximity. But no, I was not and am not that person, who can so easily engage in conversation with a perfect stranger when encouraged.
Much earlier, when I was 18, I was sitting on a plane before takeoff on my way to an ex-boyfriend’s funeral. I was devastated and trying not to openly cry. Just before they closed the doors, I heard a ruckus from the front of the plane. In strode three gangly, grungy twenty-somethings with tattoos up and down their sleeveless thin arms. One gentleman, with long black hair, cut in a “I don’t care” hairdo, yelled “Party in the back of the plane,” to which his mates jeered and cheered as if they were entering a bar.
The girl sitting snugly next to me, whispered into my ear, “It’s the Stray Cats,” as if we had been best buds the whole time and she was letting me in on a secret. The boys moved into our row and the row behind us.
Still distraught, I didn’t join in on the barrage of questions aimed at the band, but I listened intently.
“So, where are you guys headin’?” asked a man seated behind them.
“We’re opening up for The Stones in Denver,” grunted one, who then high-fived the man who quickly offered his raised palm.
“Awesome, man!”
And it was a party the rest of the flight. The boys ordered beers and generally whooped it up. Everyone around us was asking for their signatures, except of course me, trapped between my tragic state and the joy of the moment around me.
My seat mate, taking obvious pity on me after I was unable to completely hide my distress, prompted by thinking how my ex-boyfriend would have reveled at this moment, asked me if I wanted a signature from the band’s lead singer and guitarist.
“Sure,” I confessed.
She ripped out a page from her composition book, and passed it down the row to him, he being the least rowdy and more subdued of the crew. He signed it and passed it back. I still have it in my photo album to this day. But it makes me sad. It reminds me of one of the hardest times in my life and still brings tears to my eyes as I write this, squeezed between two strangers on a flight to Colorado almost 40 years later.
On this flight, there seems to be no one who is famous or who stands out, but as I look around I wonder at what fascinating and crazy lives these people around me might have, where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, what they’ve done. There are so many stories here that I will never know. And the person sitting next to me might be the most captivating of all, if only I had the courage to inquire.
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