I wasn’t looking forward to the flight. Why should I? I knew I was going to be sandwiched between two people. I just didn’t know who as I waited to board my flight to Dallas-Fortworth. It’s one of the things I don’t like: knowing what your seat companion is going to be like and if you will get along fabulously or they will ignore or you will find the obnoxious. Or they may have some personal habits that actually repel you. Or you could be deceived by first appearances and find out they’re not all that great once the plane gets off the ground. You never can tell.
When I got to my seat, my right hand companion was sitting already. I sat down and we made some chit chat. He was an engineer. He seemed a decent fellow but there was a faint odor that clung to him. He didn’t seem to be a bad traveling companion, except for the smell.
We were getting close to being finished boarding when my left-side travel companion came by. He was tall, an African-American man probably around 6’6” in height. I groaned inwardly as he folded himself into his chair. I knew he was as unhappy as I was that we were sitting next to each other. I know he wanted to be sitting next to a petite woman. I was… the guy on my right kinda took up a fair share of chair realestate.
I looked at both of them and said, “Well, this is really messed up, the airlines made sure there were three guys with broad shoulders sitting in one row.” Mr. Big laughed and we started chatting.
He was in the Army, stationed at Wheeler on his way back East for training. It was interesting. He was in a support role, moving Army personnel all around the Pacific using aircraft, ships, whatever. We talked and I said, “let me guess, you’re a Colonel, right?”
“How did you know?”
“too young to be a general and too much men to be anything but lower than a Lieutenant Colonel.”
It was a fascinating conversation until all of us felt the need to be quiet… and the need to try and get to sleep to minimize the effect of jet-lag when we landed at our destination.
Then the trouble began. The colonel couldn’t help it. There was no way his knees could fit in between the space the alloted. He had to cross the border that’s defined between strangers on a plane. There is no helping it. It is inevitable. Mr. Engineer though, I believe he though I was his wife. His body was turned in toward me and his legs hung over the border defined in three dimensions by the arm rest between our seats. It cross over regular and I could feel it dipping closer and closer to my shoulders from time to time, startling me awake as I drifted off to sleep which in turn would jossle the Colonel out his own stupor. The engineer would wake and give me bleary eyed appraisals like I was the offending party, which of course, he probably thought I was. He probably didn’t know he was crossing the border between sovereign nations in his sleep.
He would shift positions from time to time and I would raise my hopes, thinking this time around I would not be shocked and wake up. Each time, I was wrong. I was getting frustrated. I was getting more and more exhausted and every time I slipped on the boarder of sleep, it would be taken away by the near touch of the man to my right.
The flight traveled on into the night, hour after hour, mile after mile, much to slow for my tastes, prolonging my agony, which really is not a problem. There are so many more epople with worse situations. I didn’t care about anyone at that point though, just about the sleep that was evading me.
Not soon enough, we landed. I was in Dallas. The Colonel stood up, straightened and I felt the relief for him. The engineer, he looked a bit sullenly at me but it was enough for me to know that he felt a certain disdain for me as I did for him, however unwarranted (both ways) but because we had lost sleep. I gave the Colonel my card after a few pleasantires. Then we headed down the aisle, into the corridor and the bright, sterile lights of the terminal, bound for the next flight— and the next flying companion.
