Three airplane conversations in These titles mean nothing.

1. On the overnight flight from Newark to Dublin on a wide body United flight. My son in the aisle seat, me in the middle and the woman who said she liked to talk in the window seat. She was from Belfast, I heard her light accent. She’d brought her son to be a counselor at a camp. She was part of a family business which ‘helped people at the worst times of their lives’. She was familiar with the crew on the plane - she had worked for United in the US. She ordered white wine with ice from the attendant and I did too, starting my drink of choice for the trip - even if ice is hard to come by in parts of where we went.
   We talked a lot - the tv system wasn’t working, the crew kept apologizing and trying to ‘reboot’ it, but it never got so it worked (on the way home it did, and a vast, personal choice screen entertainment helps the hours go by).
   She told me she learned ‘customer service’ working for the airline, and then applied it in her family business.
   We discussed our families, our work lives, whether we planned to cook at the house in County Clare - John said no, we were eating out, and he was right. I told her my story about the woman on the train and the story I had told her from the Donald Hall short story about the college teacher and the young girl student and getting her address and sending her the book and not receiving a thank you and then later when I was trying to organize my books, finding her address and writing again to ask if she would mind returning the book and getting no answer to that either. Yeah, it was that kind of conversation.

2. Two weeks later, on the same flight home from London to Newark, this time in the daylight and this time with the tv working, in the middle section I had a young man sitting beside me. He was a student of English and American literature - a fan of Mark Twin and George Orwell who surprisingly did not know who Graham Greene was. He was informed though about the semi, almost, not quite at all Russian coup that had just happened, was just happening, didn’t happen at all. He talked about his family, his school, his interest in WWII history. He was visiting friends in New York City and planned a short visit to Texas to see a friend, a former exchange student. He was nervous about going to Texas. I told him I’d had a good time in Texas. I tried to tell him the story about the kind of people you find everywhere - the kind of people you expect to find. He finally told me, twice in fact, that he was tired and needed some sleep. So I directed my attention to the tv, which this time was working. I’ll tell you about the movie another time.

3. On the second flight home from Newark to Minneapolis, a young black man greeted Katie and me and sat beside me. He was polite and nicely dressed and as the plane began to take off, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, he made the Sign of the Cross. I had not seen anyone do that in a long long time. I said - I saw you make the Sign of the Cross. I liked seeing that. Sometimes I say a Hail Mary. He said he’d gone to Catholic schools all his school years and had even thought of becoming a priest. He had a light accent and I asked him where he was from. Western Africa, Liberia, he said. I told him I was traveling with my son and family and he was impressed that I had such a good son. He said children should take care of their mothers as they get old. He hadn’t seen his mother in four years, he hoped to be able to visit her soon. This trip was to visit his brother in Minneapolis. He has a sister in the States too. He liked the US, there is opportunity here, he said. And as we approached the landing, I saw him make the Sign of the Cross again, and murmur a silent prayer. I felt safer. The whole plane was safer. The whole world, perhaps....

Last updated June 28, 2023