Book review

I am intentionally antisocial on planes, because if you get sucked into a conversation at 37,000 feet, there’s no escape. The second my butt hits the seat I take immediate refuge in a book. I imagine I look immersed, rather than unfriendly, but trust me, I am absolutely unfriendly.

On a recent one-and-a-half hour flight from North Carolina, I finished a novel I was halfway through. The book was 464 pages and I boarded the plane at the halfway point, so that meant a lot of reading. I finished just as the plane landed, which was when the woman across the aisle asked if I liked the book.

I told her not really, to be honest.

“Neither did I,” she said, and went on to tell me she liked another book by the same author so when this one came out, she was excited. Too many catastrophes, she said. Like a bad soap opera.

In the eight minutes that it took for us to taxi to the gate and disembark, we discovered we had more in common than our book review. We both traveled down to North Carolina frequently to see our kids who have settled there. We had been teachers once. We both found the rigid seats on this particular plane uncomfortable, and it was a brand-new plane, so it didn’t augur well for the future of regional economy travel. We both couldn’t wait to get home and into sweatpants. We wished each other a safe drive home. The end.

Or was it? This interaction was short but is still, days later, lifting my mood re existence. The world at large inched toward being a less forbidding place. And we hadn’t even exchanged names.

What a lovely thing it is, to ask a simple question! I realized that even though I still will argue I like be left alone on flights, connection feels like flash kinship. Maybe on my next flight, I’ll be the one to speak first to someone I don’t know and will never see again. Who knew that what looks like no big deal is one small way we can save each other, if we are to be saved.