A great ending can fix almost anything
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Elysha, Clara, Charlie, and I were aboard an airplane heading to Washington, DC. Charlie had been talking about this flight for weeks. It would be his first since 2019, when we flew to Florida to spend a week at Disney before the pandemic.
Charlie is obsessed with aviation. He has a pile of books on the subject. Spends loads of time on flight simulators. Watches videos about airplane construction and operation. He’s visited Connecticut’s Air and Space Museum in Connecticut twice in the past three months.
He couldn’t wait to be flying again.
But when we found our seats in row 18 of the plane, we discovered that we were sitting in a row without a window. Charlie was devastated. Ultimately, he could crane his neck and look out of the window behind us, but it certainly wasn’t what he had been dreaming about for weeks. To his credit, he made the best of it, but he was deeply disappointed.
Meanwhile, Elysha and I were also suffering. Three women sitting behind us – two behind me and one across the aisle behind Elysha – were talking. Loudly.
Exceptionally loudly.
Their conversation was so loud that when Elysha and I donned headphones and maximized the volume on our devices, we could still hear their conversation.
They were loud beyond imagination. Comically loud. It was the kind of loud that makes you wonder if someone paid an enormous sum of money to prank us with these unrealistically loud women.
Worst still, their topics of conversation were atrocious.
No joke, they included:
- A recent colonoscopy. So much about the colonoscopy.
- Emails that needed to be sent
- Their frustrations with navigating automated phone systems
- Bananas vs. oranges
- Meetings that needed to be scheduled
- Meetings that had already been scheduled
- Meetings that didn’t need to be scheduled
- Decisions about wedding guests and seating charts
- A grandmother requiring her granddaughter to drink V8
- The speed of planes vs. trains
- A debate over pants vs. skirts on airplanes
Everything they said was benign and trite and painful.
Between Charlie’s disappointment over the window and these three megaphones of misery, it was an awful flight.
Then the clouds parted.
As we were exiting the plane, Charlie peeked into the cockpit of the plane, and Clara mentioned to the flight attendant that Charlie wants to be a pilot when he grows up.
“Well,” said the flight attendant. “Then he should meet the captain.”
Less than a minute later, Charlie was sitting in the copilot’s seat, identifying controls for the captain thanks to his time using flight simulators, including the one specific to this plane.
Sort of a dream come true for him and maybe the best moment of the entire vacation for him.
I often say that the beginnings and endings of stories are the most important parts, and it’s true. Three minutes spent in the copilot’s seat washed away all of the disappointment and frustration of the flight and made it one we will never forget.
