Dropping to Make an Angel

Just me and Sun Ra here, over the Bo Hai Sea.  I have to surreptitiously check my phone to see which song from “Night of the Purple Moon” has the Saturnalian sparkling the keys up in my ears just now.  It is “Narrative.” Technically, Air China does not want anyone to have a phone on while flying.  It doesn’t matter whether it is on “Airplane Mode” or not.  All phones must be powered off.    

It is more important than usual this morning to flout this rule.  Beside me are two women from Spain.  They are older, fashionably dressed, and are in the middle of a three hour conversation.  I notice the aspirated th in the z’s of  “zapatos” and “corazon” and convince myself that they are from Iberia and not Latin America.  Spanish is beautiful but even harder to ignore than Chinese.  Every time a track stops I am reluctantly drawn into their conversation. 

Two seats up ahead of me is a television screen.  Three rows after that there is another television and then another, forming an entire grid of television screens that flash and flicker, pleading with me to consider them.  What appears to be a very typical made-for-the-masses Chinese melodrama is unfolding.  Earnest, well-off people are pouting.  People are fighting.  Someone is regretful and cries in the rain lying on the street.  Two seats up on the left someone has their computer on and a young American couple, by the looks of it, are falling in love and racing around a campus in the snow.  We get headshots, and then the camera pulls back to watch them drop backwards to make snow angels.  This is pursued as if it were undeniably the apogee of young adult winter fun, so powerful is love, or at least the rituals of courting.  I try to remember the last time I made a snow angel.  My mind arrives on a memory of my younger daughter dropping to make an angel near the St Lawrence River last winter in Quebec.  But as I recall, I did not take the backwards plunge, myself.  

  

I’ve a faint headache.   The spasmodic resistance-submission-renewed resistance engagement with seven different broadcast screens is not helping.  Last night I was up late with stepson in Shibuya, playing through tube amplifiers, smashing snare drums as hard as one could possibly hit something and freestyle rhyming, which quickly descended into free style screaming.  I heard the recordings I’d on my iPhone this morning, walking the long stroll over to gate one-forty-one.  I’m lucky my headache isn’t more pronounced.  Coffee will help.  Yes.  A double shot when I land.  I adjust my arm again.  Cramped in here.  Cramped in economy, windswept and ready to get off.