How I got here

A very bumpy but short ride from BWI to JFK where I sat next to a guy reading or at least carrying Infinite Jest. He was nervous about the turbulence and when he took off his coat after we managed to climb to altitude, I smelled that musty college boy dorm smell. He said, “this seems like the kind of flight where we should clap when we land.” He was en route to Indiana to visit Purdue to check it out for graduate school. I said I was thinking you must be in graduate school if you’re carrying that book; I asked him what discipline: aerospace engineering. He said he doesn’t like flying despite loving planes. We landed at JFK and he and I silently clapped.

On the flight to Milan, I ended up in an aisle seat crammed in with a tall and wide man, like an American-size Italian. The older Milanese man on the other side of him wanted me to move once we realized the plane wasn’t full. I croaked out “Forse posso muovere?” and the gentleman and his wife and the big guy all said “Certo, certo! Vai!” in a way that was encouraging but also menacing. And my rule-follower training wanted me to ask the flight attendant, and had me blurt back in English “Just go?? Without asking?” and they didn’t understand me for multiple reasons, it seemed. But I moved and it was fine. The Italian woman on window seat of my new row and I had one of those intimate airplane friendships: I passed on her beverage from the attendant and then she curled up onto the empty seat to sleep and her socked toes were touching my leg.