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.
