Jesus on a Plane

So I’m writing from a plane to Las Vegas where I’m going for a conference for four days. I’m trying to get some of my daily work done in advance on my laptop because I have 21 meetings over two days (and I’m not even remotely kidding). Given it’s a four-hour plane ride, I sprung for the $20 upgrade, which means I get to sit in a middle seat between two people on the exit row but it’s actually quite spacious. So before the plane even took off, as everyone was going through that cramped and generally unpleasant exercise of finding their seats, and enough space in the overhead bins for their bags, this young guy comes up with the exact same seat assignment as the woman next to me. They have been double-seated.

I listen for a while. “But I'm elite!” she kept saying. Unlike me, she didn’t have to pay the extra $20 to spread out because of her elite status. I listened to the young man, who was very polite. He sat down in the row behind us and I think was trying to appeal to her better nature by saying he’d just started his job three weeks ago and had a very important dinner in Vegas that he couldn’t miss tonight.

She wasn’t about to give up the seat (that turned out to not be hers). She had blonde hair and a Tampa tan, pink (lowcut) shirt and matching running shoes. There was a nasally tone to her voice and she smiled with wild eyes, as she said "I'm not going anywhere." And even when the steward guy figured out that indeed that wasn’t her seat at all—hers was way back in the back, a center seat (like the one I’m sitting in now but no leg room)—she never offered to move or apologize. She simply waited for him to politely say, that was fine, he’d take the other seat, he was just grateful to be on the plane at all.

Somehow you get to know people on planes, especially on longer trips, even if a word never passes between you. Word got back to our row (I’m not sure how word travels so fast on planes, especially since everyone is a stranger to everyone else) but it got back that the young guy has been seated in First Class, which immediately made me smile. He had given up his good seat with the leg room in anticipation of a cramped middle seat—and it doesn’t matter if you’re sandwiched between Twiggy and her twin in that situation—it’s just a bad place to be—for four hours.

When the lady next to me, whose name is actually Sheila, found out she shook her head in disgust. As if he had intentionally bested her by getting moved to First Class. “They should have put an elite in First Class,” she said. “I’m an elite!” she reaffirmed. Then she started complaining over my lap to the gentleman on the other side. “Aren’t you elite, too?”

The two commiserated. What was this world coming to if there was no separation between the elite and poor slobs who were regular economy business class. Well, I didn’t tell her I paid the extra $20 for the leg room and that I was also a lowly economy person posing between two elites so I could get my work done (and of course, anyone who knows me knows that I have very very long legs). I also did not tell her that my company booked this flight on AirTran, which I would never do being from Atlanta—I mean we fly Delta the same way as we drink Coke instead of Pepsi.

Anyhow, after a while the young man passed by us, I don’t know why, walking back from First Class maybe to get something out of his bag, she glared at him and he looked sheepish. I felt a pang of sympathy (and a little twinge of victory) on his behalf. But he wasn’t the one who needed it. And what does Jesus have to do with any of this? Well, I think he would have smiled, too.