I flew First Class today. For the first time. I flew from Orlando, Florida, to Charlotte, North Carolina, then from Charlotte to San Francisco.
Of course, since I prepared for my flight in the usual way – by getting very little sleep – I slept through the first leg of my First Class journey. I scarcely noticed the howling babe behind me, but I did not get to enjoy the drinks and snacks I knew First Class would provide.
No matter. My flight from Charlotte to San Fran was the real thing.
I had a three-hour layover in Charlotte. I spent it moseying up and down the concourses, talking to my husband on the headset of my cell phone. (That no longer looks crazy, by the way, walking alone, talking to someone, without so much as holding a phone to your ear. We’ve gotten used to it.) The restrooms of the Douglas International Airport have attendants – persons of appropriate gender and foreign birth who welcome you to Charlotte and make you feel guilty for peeing without putting dollars in their jars. One was humming a little African song I thought I recognized. I put ninety cents in her jar (hey, if every patron does that, she’ll go home loaded) and asked her if she was from West Africa. She was from Central Africa, the Congo. She took a moment to sing the song, in French, and translate each line. I asked her what other languages she spoke (besides English and French, obviously). She spoke four Central African dialects – Lingala, Swahili, and two I forgot in the minutes between when she told me and when I texted my husband. She taught me how to say “hello” in each of the dialects (though, “Jambo,” in Swahili, I already knew, so she taught me some some other things, all of which I’ve already forgotten. I am not an auditory learner). As of this writing, I remember “Ebue,” because it was the shortest and because I could picture its spelling in my mind.
I emerged from my restroom language lesson (Rosetta Throne?) to find that my flight had been undelayed and was now boarding. I was one of the last on the plane, first class or no. But at least I made it.
I took my seat to find I had already missed the first round of drinks, though the flight attendant took great pains to take my drink order for as soon as we were in the air.
“Coffee, please,” I said. I had drunk so much over Christmas…
I met the people in front of me – Greg and Lori from San Mateo, who, noticing my tie-dye shirt, asked me if I was headed to a Grateful Dead tribute concert called Further. I told them I was going home, to Humboldt County, which, if you know it, is pretty much a living tribute to the Grateful Dead.
Then I opened my book, The Road to Reality by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, and, with brief breaks to enjoy the takeoff and the splendour of the Earth’s turning away from the Sun, began to read about the relationship between the Platonic mathematical, physical, and mental worlds.
Alas, sleep soon overcame me once again. Quite forcefully. Curled in a strange position, my book still open on my lap, my head nodded and I drifted from consciousness into unconsciousness and back several times. (I wonder if this helps me understand things on new and more profound levels. I like to think so.)
I awoke to coffee waiting for me on the table between me and my seatmate. Lovely.
I acknowledged the sunset once again. It was delightfully long, thanks to our plane’s fleeing the parts of the Earth turning away from the Sun at some seven hundred miles per hour. I returned to my book, finding that the complexity of Penrose’s topic is further complicated by the English-ness of his writing.
Soon, ‘twas time for dinner. I noticed the stewardess (oh, can’t we get off our damn PC horses and just call them that?) taking meal orders. She was taking them in no discernable order, yet had a little clipboard and was checking names or seats or something off as she took each order.
When she got to me and my seatmate, the only meal option left was pasta. What luck! I had been dreading the little decision of what to have for dinner and was able to enjoy my meal so much more knowing that I had not made a sub-optimal selection, nor any selection at all. I had a brief debate with my inner drinker and finally decided on red wine with dinner. A First Class dinner really begged to be enjoyed with red wine.
I read a short interview with a medical researcher and frequent US Airways flyer in the back of the in-flight magazine, which inspired me to add classical music to my First Class meal. I chose Chopin’s polonaises, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy (not that I ever care who’s playing them, really. All those folks sound good, as far as I can tell). The whole experience was very classy. There was still a bit of color in the southwestern sky. A rainbow, even, on the horizon – indigo of night, with a bright star (or planet), descending into bright blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
The wine affected me nicely. I gazed out of the window, enjoying my wine, food, music, and view. I tried to think about something other than nursing.
That is the one thing I can do for myself as I contemplate starting work in the ER: tell myself not to think about it. Until I apprehend the reality of it, I should waste no time feeling apprehensive about it.
Mostly, I am vastly relieved to have a job. Part of me mourns having to return to work at all, though. Part of me was excited by the uncertainty I felt in those early weeks of unemployment.
I reassure myself that it will be nights – I will be a strange creature of the night, working but three a week, spending the other four creating my novel (and other writings).
My novel.
My dear novel. My hope. My joy. My deliverance.
I have a lot riding on you.
And you are why I am returning to work and not going one hundred thousand dollars into debt to go to grad school. It is so I can create you. I will spend the next few months, only, I hope, creating you, preening you, polishing you (but never, no never perfecting you, for there is no such thing as “perfect” and I will not allow the illusory construct of perfection to interfere with the mere sufficience I require in your creation – though I do hope you will be functional and elegant).
I picture you being complete around June. Logically, I thought I would complete you by August, one year from when I started work on you, but in my mind’s eye I was really picturing you complete in June. I asked myself why.
Two reasons: one, so that I will have more time to try to sell you before Trent and I move on to the next chapter and, likely, location of our lives. I do not want to have to nurse much longer. Two, and probably the true cause for my envisioning your completion in June, is that that is around the time of year that the story you contain should cease to be told.
I sat in my seat, drifting on wine and Chopin, listening to the notes go up and down, wondering why it is that we call a high note “high” and why we picture that as “up,” thinking of the scene in which my characters follow the paths of the notes – up and down, up and down – wondering if I am mad to try to write what I am writing.
In that reverie, sleep overtook me again. In spite of my upright position and unsupported head, in spite of the variable, occasionally loud, percussion of the piano in my ears (normally I require absolute silence and earplugs to be able to sleep at all), sleep overtook me. I drifted in and out of consciousness, my awareness going up and down, up and down.
I awoke to sobriety and an empty seat next to me. I took that opportunity to go to the bathroom and ask the stewardess a couple of novel-research questions about crew and scheduling.
Bathroom use has been something of an issue on our flight. It would seem the* hoi polloi from cattle class do not understand the significance of the curtain that separates them from us First Classers, and individuals keep trying to slip through to take second-class shits in our First Class facilities. The stewardess even had to make an announcement overhead to try to quell their near-Marxist disregard for the division between themselves and the quality.
Speaking of colonic emissions, I have been very gassy on this flight. Many farts. Now, I have farted many a fart in my life – loud farts, quiet farts, deadly farts, benign farts, lit farts, public farts, private farts, sleepy farts, underwater farts, even meditative farts, but this is the first time in my life that I have ever farted First Class farts.
They’re ok. Luckily they don’t seem to be too stinky and the noise of the engine covers their rips. And my seatmate is very, very old, so I can only hope that anything offensive will be blamed on her rather than on blond, buxom me.
I met my seatmate. She’s reading a book called Whittington, which is the story of a cat in the court of Marco Polo. It’s her granddaughter’s book. She reads all her granddaughter’s books, as she is a children’s librarian. I told her I was writing a novel. She asked what about. I told her the protagonist was a fifteen-year-old girl, and that I hoped the book would invite the reader to ask some big questions.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Questions of Life.”
She understood.
I told her I wasn’t sure whether the book would turn out to be young-adult accessible, in spite of its young protagonist. I didn’t tell her that it was because of all the “fuck”s and “vagina”s. I think those words should be allowed in literature intended for teenagers, but the people I hope to have help me exchange my novel for money (and acclaim) may not agree.
I didn’t say all that. She is hard of hearing and conversation is difficult. Also, I wanted to write this.
So this is my experience in first class. The usual consciousness, with more leg room, food, wine, and coffee.
I think Fryderyk and Vladimir made me feel more elegant than did the big seat and rights to the fore-plane potty. And I had them in my iPod all along.
*Yes, I know this is redundant, like saying "PIN number" or "ATM machine," but my editor thought not having "the" before "hoi polloi" was revoltingly pedantic.
