the friendly skies

This past week was spent in Minnesota as a part of my 'new job' training. In my past jobs, I was corralled as a simple office monkey, never straying far from my cubicle or desk. For the first time in my multitude of jobs, I was scheduled to ship out to another city. And for the first time in 30 years, I flew.

I was four the last time I stepped foot onto a plane, headed to Boston with my parents to attend my Uncle's wedding. And while I don't remember much of the flight, I do recall that it was a positive experience, because as I stepped off the plane, the stewardess handed me a little plastic 'airline pilot' pin...a pin which I proudly wore all weekend, clear through the rehearsal dinner, wedding ceremony, and reception.

Air flight has changed since then, which I quickly found as my shaving cream and toothpaste were confiscated at the security terminal…though for some odd reason I was allowed to keep my razor. Once stripped of these things, I was declared 'safe'...I could slice someone with a razor blade but terrorist activities like soaping windows wouldn’t occur.

Shortly after my shaving and tooth brushing privileges were revoked, I was on the plane and in the air. It was smooth sailing until about an hour into the flight when the 'fasten seatbelts' sign lit up and the captain announced that we were entering into some turbulence.

"Just speed-bumps in the sky," I overheard a mother tell her screaming child, who, coincidentally, was sitting directly behind my seat. Unfortunately, the reassurance didn’t seem to work. The screaming continued.

The guy sitting next to me shifted in his seat and tried to settle in for a nap despite the turmoil behind us and the turbulence around us. Opening one eye, he glanced up at me and said, "Don't bother waking me if the plane goes down."

Deciding that I wasn't particularly fond of airline comedians, I answered, "what...and let you miss out on all the fun?"

And as the plane jostled and bounced through the air, for a brief moment I actually thought that perhaps we might go crashing down. And, for a few minutes at 34,000 feet above ground, I wondered if this flight might end up like a real life version of Lost (Wednesday nights at 9:00, this Fall on ABC).

I was pretty sure no undiscovered islands existed between Pennsylvania and Minnesota, though perhaps some little isle in one of the Great Lakes had escaped detection. In the end, it didn’t matter. The plane didn’t crash. The quest for undiscovered land masses in the Great Lakes continue…and the screaming from the kid behind me continued as well, all the way to Minneapolis.

When we finally landed, the two hour flight seemed to have lasted weeks and proved to be nowhere as positive as my first flight 30 years earlier. Especially considering that, as I stepped off the plane, no little plastic pilot airline wings pin was given to me this time around.