Every time I plan a trip overseas, someone asks me, “How long is the flight?” and I reply, “Depends on who’s sitting next to me.” It seems as if I always attract an inordinate number of talkers. I do not initiate conversations, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
On a flight to London, I had earphones, a good book, and shades for my eyes. That should have been a tip off, but nothing stopped the wind-up chatty woman in the seat next to me. She talked, and talked and talked, and said absolutely nothing. When I said, “I’d like to read now.” She replied, “Oh, what are you reading?” and kept talking. She even drowned out the music on my earphones. Her lips kept flapping and created a breeze. Finally, I turned off my overhead light and said, “I’m going to get some shut eye now,” and she proceeded with a bedtime story of her life. She finally fell into a snoring sleep as we taxied down the runway at Heathrow. If I weren’t wearing shoes, I would have put a sock in her mouth.
The aisle seat is my favorite because I need to uncramp my legs, and I dislike crawling over people. When I boarded an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York, I was dismayed to discover that I had been assigned a window seat with two hefty seatmates in my row. The woman on the aisle had taken a sleeping pill, and the man in the center was dribbling an onion and garlic sandwich down the front of his shirt. I awakened the woman in the aisle seat, and told them both that I would be getting out of my seat frequently, and since she was going to sleep the whole way, perhaps she would like to switch. She refused. The guy in the seat in front of me promptly put the back of his seat into my lap.
The first time I crawled over the man in the center seat, he enjoyed it too much, so I asked the flight attendant to tell him to get up and let me out. She said, “You tell him.” This was, after all, El Al, the safest but not politest airline in the sky. By the time we landed, everyone hated me.
It was a school holiday in France when my husband and I flew on Air France from Paris to New York. The plane was filled with screaming, crying and shouting children. All of them were running up and down the aisle. When one of these drippy-nosed urchins climbed into my lap, I shouted, “Where is this child’s mother?” No one answered. The kid was a brat and I didn’t speak French. When the cart rolled by, I traded him for a drink.
My husband had a seat-kicking child behind him and beseeched me to trade seats with him. “Just a little break,” he begged. “Sure,” I replied. We switched seats and he plopped down next to the Ukrainian woman wrestler, who put one of her sleeveless arms on the back of his seat. He bolted forward before getting entangled in her armpit hair, and yelled, “Want to trade again?” “Nope,” I replied, “Want a lawn mower?”
And then there was the broken seat on a flight to Hong Kong. I was moved to a seat in a section where I was in the middle of a family reunion of 100 Chinese people going to a wedding. I didn’t speak Chinese and they didn’t speak English, so since they couldn’t ask me if I was a relative of the groom or the bride, we all smiled and nodded a lot. To this day, I feel guilty that I didn’t bring a gift.
Esther Blumenfeld (oxygen please.)