It's been a while — I've been away — but I'm back in Cambridge and back online. Sunday night's flight home from Hilton Head might be passable as eventful: the Wife and I had a brief layover in Charlotte, and a 10 p.m. flight out to Boston. We were well-settled on the flight out of Charlotte and winding our way across the tarmac when the captain reported over the PA that an undesirably blinking light on his control panel warranted a return to the gate. As it turned out, the light would not stop blinking, and we had to disembark and board another plane. The flight left probably ninety minutes late, and the Wife and I were home by 1:30.
Make no mistake, good readers: I do not harbor any delusion that the above story is at all blogworthy. Rather, I tell it because it is so awfully, irretrievably, and dare-I-say
typically uninteresting. As I watched fellow passengers labor to fit their carry-on baggage into the overhead compartments —
come on, people! You had it all stowed in an identical plane an hour ago! — I made the following bittersweet prediction to the Wife: at some point in the coming months we will make use of this nonevent as conversation fodder during a dinner out with some other married couple.
And really, nothing quite lights up a thirtysomething double date like a game of Air Travel Incident Pong. Take the following:
BARNEY: ". . . and I'm looking out the window, and the guy with the deicer falls off the wing. I mean, I actually saw him wipe out, and I hit the call button to tell somebody. We were delayed twenty-five minutes at the gate while they waited for the paramedics."
WILMA: "Here's one for you. You know the little rotating clip that holds the tray table in place? Well, mine
broke off on the plane back from Bermuda. The flight was full, I couldn't switch seats, and I had to sit there and hold the tray table in place
with my hands during taxi, takeoff, and landing."
BETTY: "Come on, guys. I was in the middle of a story. Now where was I? Oh. Yeah — so the woman at the counter says to me, 'You can take the 6:30 flight, but it will cost you an additional
fourteen hundred dollars.'"
And then FRED weighs in with "You should have seen that coming. Plane fares never make any goddam sense. But the FAA regs — you've got to be kidding me. Last September they had us
get off a plane and get on another one, just because of a blinking light."
Why every night out seems to devolve into these mile-high tit-for-tats is one of life's deeper mysteries. My guess is that conversations veer inevitably in this direction because air travel mishaps are the purest fuel for the empty banter to which Dinner For Four is so awfully susceptible. The narrative alphabet is familiar. Everybody knows the letters — tray-tables, beverage carts, fare adjustments — and they can generally be arranged into a story just interesting enough to be worth telling, but not meaningful enough to draw us out of the petty self-absorption in which childless couples are so comfortable. Once you have kids, of course, you can devote your empty talk to them instead, since you'll no longer be traveling.
In the meantime, air travel allows you to cast yourself as hero ("So I said to the woman, 'There's no way I'm paying fourteen hundred dollars to fly to Philadelphia.'") or Picaro ("The flight attendant tore off my toenail with the beverage cart — that's the last time I wear sandals in an aisle seat."), to flush out some of the lowest forms of villainy ("The jerk in front of me brought his seat back before we reached cruising altitude."), to develop quest narratives ("They ended up routing us through Bangor, Maine.
Bangor, Maine.").
Makes you wonder about what routine misfortunes couples discuss in developing countries. When Merv and Wanda Ngebe dine out in Lagos, do they carp about how Wanda's cousin was almost
stoned to death for fornicating? Do Lance and Barbara Subramanian gripe over Mai Tais about the Islamist militias that always seem to swoop down on their hostage raids in the middle of
Saturday Night Live?
Anyway, check
this out. Richard offers interesting insights about the
geopoliticus — and for whatever unrelated purpose he links to me as well.
