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My Last Flight With My Wife Was Right Out of a Seinfeld Episode

Truth really is stranger than fiction

Mike Scarpiello
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
4 min readDec 29, 2023

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There is a classic episode of the sitcom Seinfeld where Jerry and Elaine go to the airport and find out there are only two seats left on the plane. One is in coach and one is in first class. After a brief discussion, Jerry makes the case that he flies first class all the time and that Elaine won’t even know what she’s missing.

Elaine acquiesces and agrees to take the coach seat, and as you can guess Jerry has a great flight and meets a model, and Elaine’s experience is the exact opposite. She has nothing but problems in her middle seat in coach.

On a recent flight from West Palm Beach to Chicago, my wife and I had a similar experience. When I checked in on my phone, I was offered an upgrade to first class for $90. I asked my wife to check into her flight to see if she could also upgrade. It turns out there was only one seat left in first class, so we had to decide who would take the first class seat.

My wife and I are in our 50s and at her last corporate job she had flown first class many times. I had only flown first class when it was offered as an upgrade, which only amounted to a couple of times. So my wife was kind enough to let me take the seat in first class and she would sit in coach.

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Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Mike Scarpiello
Mike Scarpiello

Written by Mike Scarpiello

UX Designer, writer, musician, poet, political satirist, musician, bull runner, craft beer enthusiast, and UX Design mentor at https://shorturl.at/jRV2i

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