On our last holiday
together, my husband threatened to make that announcement to the other passengers
on our Air Canada flight to Toronto.
We had just experienced
several hours delay transferring from the terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport
in Paris to our plane on the tarmac. Several v e r y s l o w buses, dispatched
in an incredibly inefficient manner, ferried the passengers to the plane. Our
departure was pushed back by several hours.
My husband
believed it was all my fault, just for
being on the passenger manifest.
Until he began
to travel more often with me, he claims to have never experienced so
many flight delays, snow storms, screaming kids, idiots who put their seat
right back in your face, broken television monitors (mine, never his), and loud-snoring neighbours. And that was just on our
last trip to India.
Given some of the
bizarre situations that find me when I fly, I have to agree with Rodney that
it’s truly a shame we can’t monetize my
perverse travel karma.
I’m not
embellishing the following story in the least: Last year, on my way to a memoir
writing retreat with guru Natalie Goldberg at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I facilitated a seat change to my row for a very
distressed woman initially seated behind me. I was deep in my book soon afterwards,
but one look from her and I realized, “I moved a chatty Cathy into the next
seat. Oy.”
Small talk be
damned, she went straight into full confessional. She was dying of cancer, her
teenage daughter had died earlier that same year of cancer, and she was
traveling with her parents who were seated up in first class. She was
uncomfortable, though, because her father had abused her as a child.
Huh?
After listening to
her troubles for almost three hours, I was an emotional dish rag albeit one with
lots of perspective and gratitude. The conversation, however, proved to be
strangely prescient. Participants at the writing retreat tried to out-do each other
sharing painful histories.
On another flight,
returning to Canada after finishing up a long, fraught, lecture tour that had
taken me to Toulouse, Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Lausanne, Dusseldorf and
Frankfurt, a male business traveler seated beside me unloaded his previous two
week journey on me. If I hadn’t experienced every conceivable hassle of my own
including a run-in with the Swiss police for not pre-purchasing a bus ticket, I
wouldn’t have cared so much that he never bothered to ask me how I was doing. Yadda yadda yadda, he droned
on until finally, not being able to stand it another minute, I looked him straight
in the eye and said:
“Excuse me, but
I think you have mistaken me for your wife.”
Not every one of
my airborne encounters has been bad, though. On a flight home from London, when
my flying still required liquid fortifications, I boarded without having a
chance to get any vodka down my throat.
As the plane began its roll, I grabbed
the arm of the man seated next to me and squeezed. Hard.
Embarrassed, I
quickly explained to him that my need for alcohol for the take-off had not been
met; that I was not a crazy person; and the minute we were in the air and I had
a drink in hand he wouldn’t even be aware I was beside him.
Over dinner, I
tried to make nice again.
“What do you
do?” I asked him.
“I’m with the
moving company AMJ Campbell International. What do you do?”
“I write books
for people who move.”
A new friendship--and lucrative sponsorship of my work--lasted long after we landed in Vancouver.
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