The elderly man to my left was staring out the plane’s window as we backed away from the gate. His gnarled and spotted hands shook. Whether from anxiety or age, I’ll never know; we never spoke.
The woman to my right spoke no English. Her eyes were closed and her lips moved as she silently worked through her rosary beads.
Squeezed between them on the airplane, I silently cursed Southwest Air for assigning me to board in group C. I’d had four hours of sleep the night before, and had hoped to make up for lost time as I flew across the country.
I’d chosen this seat, near the front, because I wanted to make a mad dash for my family the moment we arrived at the gate. What difference did it make who I sat between, when all that was available to me was center seats?
The elderly man was the first to let one rip. I heard it before I smelled it, but still he looked out the window, making no apologies for his social faux pas.
Not to be upstaged by some aged gringo, the woman to my right immediately responded with some foul air of her own. I swear I saw her grin as she prayed.
Claustrophobia set in, as I realized the only place to have a moments reprieve from my prison seat was the tiny, cramped bathroom shared by hundreds of passengers on the plane.
And so it continued, for four hours in the air. Never speaking, never discussing where they were from or what they could possibly have eaten to have caused such noxious fumes at 10,000 feet, they battled on either side of me.
A part of me wished for a drastic change in cabin pressure, so that I could breathe the pure, sweet oxygen that would flow from the mask in the ceiling.
Finally, we landed. I looked at the passengers I’d sat between, each in turn, and fully expected them to ask me who had won. Clearly, we all know who lost.
I jumped quickly from my seat, and ran to the loving arms of my family. Burying her face into my hair, Alison made a face and said, “Mommy, you stink.”
I missed you too, baby. I missed you, too.
