Lessons from the Plane

I’ve been on a number of planes lately—to and from Salt Lake City twice and to and from Hawaii. As you probably know, the planes are all jammed, the space between seats is small, there’s almost no way to sleep sitting up, the food is criminal, and people’s behavior is wildly divergent—some realize we’re all prisoners together on the metal air bus and do their best to accommodate others, while others are blissfully unaware that they are in the company of other living breathing souls and do things like take their shoes off, talk loudly on cellphones as the plane takes off, hog the armrests, put their heads on strangers’ shoulders, leap over other passengers to get to the restroom and stick their asses in said strangers’ faces, and on and on.

Lauren, Graham, and I took direct flights to and from Hawaii. We sat on the left side of the plane, a two-seat section with me next to the window, Lauren in the aisle, and Graham in the aisle in front of us. It feels better to travel with family and sit next to them because you don’t feel quite as weird about bodily contact while in the seats. But here’s the thing—eleven hours on a plane is a long time, and no matter your level of intimacy with your seat mates, shoulders and elbows thrust into your ribs and shoulders just don’t feel great.

Have I mentioned before that I have unnaturally thin shoulders, that it took me years of lifting weights for them to stop looking odd, that my mother thought my shoulders were narrower than my hips when I was a kid? So yeah, I’m not the one with a shoulder problem. But my kids definitely have shoulders they didn’t get from me. They certainly got those shoulders from somewhere, and I sure was reminded of that for the full eleven hours to Honolulu and the whole ten hours back to Boston.

“You could try leaning more into the aisle,” I said at one point.

“Maybe I should take the window, and I could lean into that,” Lauren said.

“But there is a limit to how far you can go against the window, while there’s really no limit you can go into the aisle.”

“Then I’ll get hit by the cart.”

“It doesn’t hurt that bad. Trust me, I know. You see, I have self-awareness on planes, and when I sit next to the aisles, I lean a bit into them to allow some breathing room for the person next to me. Because I’m nice like that.”

“Ohhhh, the ole self-awareness argument again.”

“It would help to have some. I’m just saying.”

“Well, I don’t mind taking the window.”

Sigh. We did not switch seats. We did manage to get through those trying times and celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary, narrowly avoiding a bitter plane-driven divorce.

A few days later, I flew to Salt Lake City on business. I fly so often on Delta to SLC that I have a bit of status—not “always upgraded to first class” status, but enough that I almost never have to sit in middle seats. Except, sigh, for the plane ride home. Ugh.

The guy in the window seat was bigger than I am, which usually makes for a rough flight. The woman in the aisle seat was a good deal smaller than I was. They were both middle age like me, and mercifully, we all had excellent airplane self-awareness. Big Window Guy leaned against that window for all he was worth and did not hog our shared armrest, and Small Aisle Lady barely touched our shared armrest. So we made the best of it and had a reasonably decent flight.

But.

But of course there’s a twist. As we were getting off the plane, Small Aisle Lady stepped backwards in the aisle as though to let me go.

“You want to go ahead of me?” I said.

She smiled. “I’ll just wait for my husband,” and she nodded toward Big Window Guy.

W.T.A.F. You two are married! And you stuck me between you for four hours?!

Do not do this, people. Sit together, share your space, and give someone else a break, or sit across the aisle from each other. Do not stick some unknowing fool between you. Mind you, they didn’t say a word to each other the whole flight. They didn’t even acknowledge each other. Why? Because they know that they are terrible people! Even worse, instead of finishing out the ruse, she let me know at the end that they had stuck it to me. At least just get off the plane and finish pretending! Terrible!

This was a crime against humanity. I demand a hearing at The Hague! I demand blood! Your meager spatial awareness efforts pale in comparison to this crime!

On your next flight, go ahead, do it again. And may karma strike—may your middle-seat passenger be Healing Girl, and may she hold hands with your husband within the first ten minutes, and may you wonder what you did to deserve that! No, actually, don’t wonder. Because you know. You know what you did.

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