flying

"You can't get there from here," was literally true last week, at least if one were relying on silver jets stamped with red and blues As. Given that is nearly the only choice from our nearly monopolized airport, I sighed with retroactive relief that my need to fly came a little sooner, that I wasn't stranded or abandoned and actually enjoyed my time in the air. A first class surprise in the back of the plane.

On the way East I scored an aisle to myself and an old fashioned pilot who told us which earthen crisscrosses were which cities as viewed from thirty thousand feet. Two hours of nothing; a beautiful break. I smiled as the Indian couple across the aisle lit up with excitement upon our descent, but you know I only saw them because I was comparing that window to mine. A skyline, a statue, even the sporting highlights of Queens--Flushing Meadows, the old and new homes of the baseball pond scum--and the globe from the 1964 World's Fair. A tourist before I even stepped off of the plane.

The journey west offered neither view nor solitude, but in the end it was my favorite, maybe of any trip on any aircraft. My neighbor was going to sleep or write some music, and I was going to watch some trashy Showtime on the pretty iPod, but since we never stopped talking, none of that happened. I don't recall how we started.

I do admit that somewhere in there the classic St. Louis question, “Where did you go to high school?” did get asked. That verbal tic, that habit, that regional compulsion is supposed to be an easy way to peg who someone is, what they’re about. And to me it does seem natural, though obviously it’s imperfect and backwards, meaningless except when it’s not. I am not, after all, a Wood River girl, except that, somewhere in there, I am. It informs how I think of things, what I appreciate, what I know is out there. Despite the fact that I do not now, have not ever, and will not in the future perm my hair, drink Busch beer, or go to the tractor pull. I know the flaws in the system.

But what other possible follow-up is there to a mention of graduating both from an exclusive college and in the bottom half of his high school class? When he sheepishly answered with an expensive acronym, he expected me to know it, and I did. "That explains it," I said, both a conclusion and a tease. When he insisted I give up my high school alma mater in exchange, I was slow to answer because I knew he wouldn't know it, and he didn't, specifically, though he congratulated me for having all my teeth. The other side of the river, after all, remains just a set of assumptions for the privileged and otherwise well-traveled in my part of the world. And yet somehow we had ended up on the same wavelength and the disparity in where we came from and are didn't seem to matter much at all. Interesting.

Or maybe not so interesting, in the scheme of things, that a 24 year-old kid and someone nearly old enough to have been his teen mother had a conversation both compelling and fun from take-off to landing. The Venn diagram of politics and social attitudes we created would have nothing larger to say than a hot shot software architect and a suburban teacher had more in common than the demographers would presume. Smart people become liberal and interested in the world. Some boys are ahead of the curve. Underestimating my age by eight years is charming. Save all the details I'll randomly remember, that's probably the sum of it, though by any calculation a far a better answer than a silent flip through the Sky Mall and a half-hearted gaze at some TV on a tiny little screen.