He Will Demur

A young kid plopped right down beside me.  I’d thought this whole row might have remained free.  It’s a fourteen-hour flight, so this is important.  A young girl, a relative?  a friend?, has taken the third seat on our middle row.  She has a big smile and an upbeat air and seems to recognize half the plane yelling around breezily in Mandarin.  My wife and kids have the three seats to the left.  The skinny kid, to my right, who is Chinese, asks the foreigner who is behind me if he can switch seats: his middle seat for the other man’s aisle seat.  This, so he can sit with his friends.  I’ve seen this movie many times and unless the guy is a head-case, he will demur on this downgrade.  And I fully anticipate that flacco will likely ask me next. 

Then, suddenly he and the smiley girl are gone.  They have moved! The plane doors are closing.  My wife gestures to me and I act before someone else does to occupy the whole row.  My wife joins me leaving the girls to their own two-for-three configuration and the four of us all command a rather dramatic upgrade. 

It’s impulsive but from the moment we we’re engaged by a United Airlines visa checker at the door, a woman obviously from China, I begin to default, once again to Mandarin.  My wife and kids who speak natively, feel no such compunction.  They speak to the Chinese staff in English. I shall always have something to prove. 

The map is on in the middle seat back.  I watch as we fly straight up into Canada and over the Hudson Bay.  At one point we’re even near Iceland, which is particularly hard to believe or conceive of as closer to Beijing than, say, New York.  Before diving into work I take the time to finish off “Slaughter House Five”, which I’d bought for my daughter but became drawn into.  It was a second-hand paperback and I’ve essentially destroyed the book, reading it these past week.  The covers gone.  The spine has separated.  It never had a chance.  I’ll have to get yet another copy if my daughter is ever to read it.  “So it goes.”