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 waiting at the gate

The pilot pulled us up to our gate at Reagan. The old couple in the row in front of me immediately stood up. Husband had the aisle seat; wife had the middle. Deplaning is a slow process. One by one, starting in the front, the passengers stand up, gather themselves, step into the aisle, open the overhead bin, pull down luggage, check themselves one last time, and then head for the exit. So the old couple in row 14 waited.

The wife had to hunch over, as all middle-seat passengers do when they stand up. The husband, in the aisle now, stretched. And he shifted, readying himself, sort of, as if he was deplaning imminently. But the Southwest deplaning process proceeded as always: indifferently. The old husband lifted his hand to his wife's shoulder and made a rubbing motion. Then he gave her two slaps on the back as he would the Pontiac after a successful road trip. The slaps said, "You made it, and I respect that." She held steady, elbows propped on the headrest in front of her, and faithfully absorbed the wordless encouragement her husband offered. Welcome to Washington, D.C., and thank you for flying Southwest.