Loving the Journey

When fate and the movie menu aligns

Sitting inert in cramped airplane seat for six hours times two- back and forth, California from Hartford- seems, to me, a necessary evil, an acid test of my endurance. I have to steel myself before every crisscross journey. But this time was different.

For starters, United Airlines had on its movie menu four of the mockumentaries by Christopher Guest, and here was my sitting duck chance to watch them all. “Best in Show”, “For Your Consideration”, “A Mighty Wind” and “Waiting for Guffman”- two out to SFO, and two back to BDL. I’d seen them already except for parts of Waiting for Guffman, but that didn’t matter. Something about watching them sequentially made me appreciate how joyfully versatile the actors are. It’s like watching a group of friends putting on a show together and having the best time.

That’s the thing about being 39,000 feet in the air. Your options are limited, so why not say yes to the pretzels and biscotti, the free beverages, the viewing options? You’ve got nothing but time between take-off and landing, carte blanche to lose yourself.

My other piece of flying good fortune was on the last leg of the trip, the short flight from Washington D.C. to Hartford. Come to find out, the group of young women in bright red warm-ups we couldn’t help but notice during boarding was the bowling team from Sacred Heart University. Did you know that bowling teams were even a thing? Not only was this news, but come to find out, each bowler traveled with her own three personal bowling balls. Not the duckpin size, but the big ones. If there are 16 members of the team, plus the coach and assistant coach, that’s a lot of bowling balls. Each set of three balls had to be loaded in bags onto the plane, so our flight was delayed. I admit this was annoying, but also a fun fact. It also was a direct tie-in to the movie Sam watched flying back from California, one he’d wanted to watch for years: The Big Lebowski. The night was all about bowling.

A journey that allows such fun diversions and parallels could ever be tedious. Just like our plane after the bowling balls were offloaded, we emerged feeling lighter. A good trip, from nose up to landing.