Flying Back
These seats are real leather. Dyed-blue leather. You wouldn’t think an airline would use real leather. Too expensive, right? But they have to think about longevity. Plastic-y vinyl isn’t going to hold up to thousands of people asses week after week.
The woman in front of me is talking to her toddler in some language I don’t recognize. I want to ask her what language she is speaking. But what am I going to do, put my head in that space between the seats in front of me and ask her? That’s weird. And honestly, I don’t care that much. She pulls her brown-with-a-tinge-of-Clairol-Nice-and-Easy-Dark-Burgundy hair into a messy ponytail, held together with a gray velvet scrunchy. She has bangs, which seems… dated. But what do I know? And what do I care? I’m sure if I saw a woman in an A-line dress, looking like she just stepped out of an episode of Melrose Place, I would probably think she looks cute. Because that’s how my stupid brain, and your stupid brain, is wired. We see things that make us remember something from long ago, and we like it. Or we could hate it, depending on the memory.
The Finnish woman (I’m just going to assume she’s Finnish, because I just came from a city that has a large Finnish population, so why not? I’ve been called Mexican in places where there was a large population of Mexicans. So if white people can blindly judge me, I feel I’m well in my rights to blindly judge them) is wearing a thin pink hoodie, and doing some knitting. Wait, is it knitting? She only had one instrument, and it has a hook on the end. What is that? Cross stitch? Is that it? What’s latch hook? Is that the thing that little kids do, to make it feel like they’re actually skilled in some sort of fiber art? She works really fast doing whatever she’s doing with that metal hook thing. She doesn’t have a ring on her finger. Single mom? Maybe she’s a nanny for some rich guy. I don’t know what the kid looks like. He’s in the seat right in front of me, and he’s too small, so I only see a glimpse of a hand every now and then. He’s loud, though. He likes cars. And planes. And screaming when he sees either. He goes between saying things in English and Finnish. He says something to the woman in Finnish, but she answers with a heavily accented “You want crackers?” She pulls out a bag of what looks like small pretzel thins. Look lady, I don’t know who you’re trying to fool, but pretzel thins are not crackers. I swear, the Finnish, taking liberties with everything American. She’s pulls out a sandwich from her small backpack/purse thing, the bag that probably 83% of women her age own. It’s in a ‘you don’t need a zipper closure because this stupid flap will keep a sandwich from falling out’ bag,. She pulls the bag down to reveal part of the sandwich. Looks like wheat bread, a rustic loaf maybe, because the shape is oval-ish. She takes a bite, and pulls the sandwich away from her mouth with a hearty tug. Yeah, rustic loaf. It looks like there’s some sort of speckled cured meat on there. Salami? It’s a pretty thin sandwich. There might be cheese on there, who knows about condiments. I’d put mustard. I used to hate mustard. Never liked it on anything. And then in high school, there’s was a hot dog cart in the school courtyard. Demetrius, the hot dog cart guy, had a deal for students: hot dog or spicy Polish sausage and a can of pop for a buck fifty. My order was always a Polish sausage, with onions, ketchup, and Stadium mustard, and a can of Cotton Club peach (second choice: cream soda). The can was always wet, with a thin napkin wrapped around it, the sausage rolled up in a foil-backed paper wrapper. It was during those days that I realized that it wasn’t that I hated mustard; I hated yellow mustard. It’s too refined, for me. Back when cavemen were pounding mustard seeds with rocks, do you think the end result was a bright yellow paste? The browner and grainier the mustard, they more I like it. Because that’s how it should be.
Some older guy next to me, well, across the aisle, is watching Netflix on an iPad, his wireless, noise-reducing Bose headphones cupping tightly to the sides of his head. His glasses sit on the edge of his nose, you know, like an old man trying to read a post card. He stares at his iPad as he shoves his United Airlines drink cup into a Twizzlers bag. Holy shit, this guy polished off a full size bag of Twizzlers in a 45 minute flight. I mean, I like Twizzlers as much as the next person, but I’m pretty sure that was “a pounder”, a sixteen ounce bag. That’s a lot of Red Dye 40. But at least he wasn’t one of those weirdos going to town on a bag of black Twizzlers.
I’ve seen this guy before. He was on my flight coming here. He sat next to a young black woman on that flight. I made up stories in my head how he hated her because of the color of her skin. I’m sure it wasn’t true, because I saw them speaking amicably. Also, I made it up in my own head. It’s so easy to make a fictional reality in one’s own head. We’re so gullible when it comes to our own thoughts, be them wrong or right. It’s kind of dangerous, if you think about it.
This plane is landing soon. And my thoughts drift to how long it will take to get a steak torta from that Rick Bayless stand in the concourse. I don’t want to miss my connection because my bolillo wasn’t toasted enough.
