I recently picked up my son and daughter-in-law from the airport and the subject of airliner models arose. My first flight was on a Lockheed TriStar L-1011 equipped with a headphone sound system and I listened to Carly Simon’s, That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be. “You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf. I’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself.” Headphones were comforting to me because I was terrified of having to carry on a conversation with my seatmate.

Harry Truman could glance out the window of his presidential airplane, a Douglas VC-118, and name the state below. I tend toward Truman, either reading a book or gazing out a window.

However, sometimes I am in the mood for human contact and find the person sitting next to me is strange just like me. On a recent flight, I asked the woman across the aisle who was going to a Rolling Stones concert in Houston, “What is your favorite Stone’s song?” She started in and never stopped all the way to wheels down. I never stood a chance.

My wife is better at conversations in the clouds. Coming back from Phoenix, she struck up a conversation with a woman half her age. We were seated separately, so walking to baggage claim, I asked how the flight went. “The young woman next to me is really nice. She’s getting married. She invited me to her wedding.”  

Mostly, I stay in my lane by reading a book and avoiding conversations. Once I was reading David McCullough’s excellent book, The Wright Brothers, while we lifted off the runway, which is pretty standard when you fly. But, it never fails to amaze me. I wished Wilbur and Orville were sitting on either side of me so I could ask their thoughts on flying in this Boeing 737 Max 8 versus their first plane, the 1903 Wright Flyer, which had no seats, pretzels, or seat back trays. 

One time I let down my guard and glanced across the aisle at a pretty young woman who seemed to have it all together. I was on the aisle seat, Karen next to me. We were on the return leg of a trip to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The woman slides over to the aisle and whispers to me. “I’m in the media business and I took a picture of you and your wife sitting quietly together and it touched me. Do you mind if I publish it on my Instagram account?” She showed me the picture and I said sure, it’s ok. The plane landed and I grabbed her suitcase from the overhead bin because she was having trouble getting it down. We chatted waiting for the aisle to clear and she thanked me again, and her eyes welled with tears and she told me her mother was sick and didn’t have long to live. I wished her the best and she walked down the aisle. You never know what the person next to you is going through.  

I feel small when I fly, and often my aloneness in the clouds and unwillingness to converse leads to introspection. My mind drifts to November 1963 with my dad at the Apco filling station. Curious, I stuck my finger in a rag ringer, an electric rubber roller mounted atop a laundry tub. It grabbed my finger and pulled it in before I panicked and yanked it out. Shaken, I wandered into the gas station lobby and heard a newsman talking through a transistor radio. John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. I think about that moment and how small I felt. Moments like that make you feel like you are flying at 35,000 feet and the world seems small like me. The view gives me the mental space to see beyond my tiny life, my little town. 

I remember when Karen’s dad died. We took off for Philadelphia on a frigid Oklahoma morning, the sun rising in a blaze of orange. Below the mighty Mississippi River snaked toward Memphis and the Gulf of Mexico. I wrote my father-in-laws eulogy on an American Airlines boarding pass at 35,000 feet.

I still have it. I miss my father-in-law, Thom Mason, a kind, just, hard-working man. I like to think of him slightly higher than the jet stream, hovering in the clouds watching over our family. He is eating pretzels with Harry Truman, Wilbur and Orville, and they are naming states and telling stories about their favorite flights, warm and easy, and gravity is no longer a thing.