Usually when I fly, I try to sit on the side of the plane with 2 seats: one for me, by the window, and one for Dave, by the aisle. I don't really mind sitting next to a stranger but it's always nice to be able to read a book or listen to music without having to feel like the person next to you is on top of you.
When I visited Cheryl in NC last summer, I sat next to this guy who was a marine and lived in Fort Lejeune and he cracked me up with stories about his crazy ex-wife. Funny how people are willing to open up to you in a short amount of time. Like, within an hour this dude had told me about fighting his best friend who slept with his wife and his messy divorce. Whoa. Entertaining and he was really nice but I felt weird waving goodbye to the poor guy as we went our separate ways toward baggage claim.
On the way back from Marco Island, I got stuck in the middle of Dave and a short guy with blonde hair who looked kind of like my cousin Darrell. I mean, exactly alike. I think I stared for a minute but that was just because I was intrigued by the similarity. I wanted to stare at him more when he sat down next to me but knew he would've seen me looking directly at his face so I resisted. I could tell he didn't want to talk during the flight, which was fine with me. Instead, he pulled out this tiny notebook the size of a credit card and started scribbling furiously in it. I looked down to see what he was writing but I didn't have my glasses with me so it was a blur but it really made me wonder what he was writing.
He wrote about 2 tiny pages which was probably the equivalent of what could be written on one Post-It note. It wasn't too much but just enough to suggest that he really had an idea about something. I wondered about it for at least 15 minutes and kept trying to see what it said but then he snapped his little thought book shut and then I was stuck just imagining things he had written.
Maybe he was writing a conversation he was going to have with someone, like a girlfriend?
It wasn't a grocery list, for sure because I specifically saw sentences, and people don't write grocery lists in sentences.
Sometimes when I write stuff down it's about films I want to remind myself to see, recipes I want to make, a person I need to return a call to, or a quote that I read earlier that day and want to remember.
Then he pulled out his Kindle to start reading a book. The text on the screen was also too small for me to read but I was able to make out the title. Oh, the fucking disappointing title. Something like, Get Rich and Make Money Fast. Really? Ugh.
His scribblings were probably something like,
Buy the book Investments for Beginners
or
Maximize my mutual funds and stocks
or
"I bore myself and those who sit around me."
Yawn.
This is one of your most well written blogs. I know it's about such a brief, seemingly meaningless encounter, but I enjoyed reading every word of it, almost like a short story excerpt.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jennifer. I usually write such brief blogs and keep them short because
ReplyDelete1) I'm impatient
2) I think people don't want to read more than a few short lines at a time
3) I never have anything really important to elaborate on
I still wish I had my glasses with me on that flight. Man, I LOVE snooping and checking people out!