about boarding positions around Christmas

I held Southwest boarding position A3. People were bunched up around the gate—baby strollers and wheelchairs and luggage and the A boarding group—but there was a little space where boarders A1 and 2 would stand, so I stood there.

 

A small black woman behind me started shooting anxious looks my direction. She suspected me of cutting in line and probably felt slighted.

 

A middle-aged white guy right behind me, probably a lawyer or accountant, also eyed me suspiciously while offering the woman more of the brain-deadening conversation he had evidently been killing the time with. It was the kind of commentary that only a perpetually positing hater of silence could offer a nervous, preoccupied woman: observations about the plane, about a trailer hooked up to the plane, about the time he flew as an unaccompanied minor, and, finally, about how preboarding was taking a while.

 

He continued serenading the nervous woman with these inanities until the preboarders got the go-ahead. Finally, she said to her co-sufferer of this linear injustice, "He"—meaning me—"must be number 1." Lawyer-accountant answered, "I'm 1. You're 2. I don't know what he is."

 

I turned and said, "I'm 3."

 

"He's 3," said our narrator. In any case, maybe they expected me to move. If I was them, I would have expected me to move. In fact, I'd be pretty irritated by me.

 

I usually would move, but this time I didn’t. I enjoyed the idea of them feeling tension I usually reserve for myself.

 

But soon more space opened up when the large number of wheelchair people and their dutiful escorts preboarded. The woman hesitated, then shifted around in front of me. The man soon followed. It was almost Christmas, after all, and, just in time, the world was set right once again.

 

about buying a customized poem

A young man, his long, damp-brown hair pulled behind his ears, sat curled over a spiral notebook at a little TV table set up along a high-foot-traffic area. I passed him on my walk to the drug store. He had posted a handmade sign: "custom poems."

 

But he is gathering his things when I pass him again on my way back. "Is it too late to get a poem?"

 

"No, it's not too late," he says, pausing, resetting the table. "What do you want the poem to be about?"

I look down. "How about—when you're about to see old friends after not having seen them in a long time."

 

"Ah. How long has it been?"

 

"At least 10 years."

 

"That's a long time. Okay." He sits down and goes to work. He should take his time, alone.

 

I step away and watch a family take pictures by the city's 20-foot Christmas tree, in front of its white lights' bright confidence in a January evening willing to forget that New Years happen and ever come.

 

Some 5 minutes later he stands, holding a page ripped from his notebook.

 

"Read it and let me know if it makes sense." I read. It's a poem written by a young man. "Does it make sense? Do you like it?"

 

"Yeah. It's good."

"Good. I'm glad you like it."

 

I hand him $10 and thank him. He appreciates it, he says.

 

I should have told him how I really feel about seeing old friends, how conflicted I am. But it's a poem by a young man.