how to board a plane

It's almost a universal, golden and such, rule: When you are waiting for a plane, look around the boarding area and identify the person you'd least like to sit next to on the upcoming flight. Be as judgmental as you want: they are too large, too small, possibly smelly, possibly emotionally disturbed, loud, creepy, asthmatic, carrying a small child. Implore the God of your fathers, "Let me not be seated next to one such as this." End with an "Amen" as you were taught. For your Father in Heaven will listen, and then, as you stumble down the cramped airplane aisle to seat 18F, that person will invariably follow, hoist their carry-on into the overhead compartment, smile benignly at you, and say, "That's me, right there next to you."

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The pilot on my early-morning flight out of Omaha last week was a tall, thin man who looked exactly like his co-pilot, another tall, thin man, except the pilot wore glasses. He also looked like a man who used to be allowed to smoke in the cockpit and couldn't understand why the practice had died out. At the same time, he also looked like a man who had never smoked in his life and ate his weight in spinach every morning. He was, then, a pilot to trust, capable of being all things to all people, an everyman. The flight attendants introduced him as Captain Brian.

Some pilots board their airplanes like boozers, massaging the space between their eyes and stubbing their toes against invisible barriers. They pat at their stomachs and small smiles appear and disappear on cue when flight attendants make jokes. They drag their rolling suitcases like a ball and chain. They do not make you confident you will arrive at your destination alive. Instead you (I) have visions of terrible crashes when these pilots pass out at the controls over a mid-flight scotch on the rocks, of being stranded in the Rockies forced to rely on my fellow passengers for survival. Fellow passengers are the last people you want to ever have to rely on. Half of the time they look mutinous and needy and the other half of the time, they're asleep. Survivor-types do not sleep. One eye open all the time.

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I sat next to a guy cradling a bonsai covered in a plastic bag, a wedding favor, he said, as if apologizing. When we were coming into land, my ears wouldn't pop and my fever broke. He took one look at my sweat-covered, slightly panicked face (I kept yawning, trying to make my ears pop) and, shifting the bonsai, pulled his Kindle closer to him as though it could negate my existence.


At the airport before, TSA agents made an important announcement, "Will the person leaving their belt at the security check please retrieve it?" The TSA agents in Omaha are generally pretty nice (I swear one even called me "honey"), but it was clear from the agent's tone that if this man (or woman), this serial belt deserter, did not go claim the belt, the TSA would hunt him down and the rest of us would witness an execution by firing squad.