FREQUENT FLIER
At one point, M travelled so much for work that he was on the hairy edge of “earning” platinum traveller status.[1] He was exactly like George Clooney in ‘Up in the Air”. He had everything down to a fine art, a tool chest of hyper tailored techniques for saving every possible second of travel time. This included a dissertation worthy study on how to pick the best lines (which included a smorgasbord of ageist (slow moving), racist (border agents profiling tendencies), sexist (female border agents ask more questions), family-ist (lots of shoes to get on and off), and general “-ist" parameters about which travellers were going to spend the most amount of time getting through security / customs. He also had arrival times whittled down to a 10 second margin of error - the objective being to get through security exactly one second before the minimum advance time cut off. Most importantly, he has an “airport pace” which is about 3x his normal, already way-too-fast-to-keep-up-with speed. To me, it literally looks like he is the Flash - he is zooming along with a blurry image trail behind him, while everyone else looks like they are frozen in time.
I, meanwhile, am incurrably slow. I have always been the person who is walking/hiking/skiing/biking half a kilometre behind everyone else. This is especially the case when paired up with a person like M, who has no half-speed and a stride that is twice as long as mine. (To be fair, I have had the same issue with by 5’ mother, so can’t really pin it on my un-leggy legs). Even as a child, I was so known for this tendency to lag, that one year I was given a custom T-shirt (pure 1970s baseball Tee with ironed on image and felty lettering) that had a big picture of a snail on the front and “Cannonball K” on the back. Everyone thought it has very funny. I did not. So keep up with M-in-airport-mode (and by keep up, I mean stay within line of sight of the back of his head) I have to do that awkward half speed-walk/half jog. This jitterbug has an added dash of anxiety, in part because I hate crowds (and line ups and low ceilings and escalators and stale air and pretty much every aspect of airports), and also because I have extended my mute, dependent border crossing role to all include aspects of travel. M is therefore holding my passport and ticket, while I am a mile behind and firmly drawn into my interior protective mental bubble. (Upon reflection, I am EXACTLY like the snail on the t-shirt.)
Add on a few years, and I have the additional challenge of having three small children (complete with wobbly fold-away stroller, falling sippycups, dragging blankets, and even shorter legs) attached to me. You would think the presence of three kids under the age of five would change the Race Bunny’s pace. You would be incorrect. We would eventually catch up to him in the various line ups, and then have to do the “excuse me, pardon me, so sorry, we’re with him…” to get to where he is located - five turns, and many disgruntled glares, deep into the cattle queue.
This take-no-prisoners approach extends into the flight itself. Back before you selected (and paid extra for) a specific seat on a flight, M - having super diamond-encrusted, golden halo flying status - would invariably be given an upgraded seat. I, being small, would invariably be given the “weight distribution” seat. This meant that I would be beside an array of humongous men whose shoulders would extend 2-10 (not joking) inches beyond the sides of their seat and/or who would raise the arm rest before sitting down and unapologetically taking over half my seat cushion. I have twice been paired with someone who required a seat belt extension. In one case, the guy's..er…’love handles’? ‘Muffin top’?…actually rested on top of my leg for the entire trip. Once it was a professional weightlifter (/protein shake rep) who had to extend his bison haunch sized arms in front of him, proping his hands on the head rest of the seat in front, for the entire duration of a flight, in order to try to stay inside the confines of his designated square foot(age). He was really considerate, and also mildly unnerving, in a gladiator kinda way. Another time, it was (presumably) some kind of pro athlete, who was ~7’6”, who managed his Hans & Frans steroid arms, by extending them across the back seat above my head. I could never risk trying to sleep for fear of waking up nestled in an oversized armpit or perhaps be smothered to death.
Once we were travelling with kids, I was relieved of the David & Goliath pairings. Instead being matched with far less relaxing seat mates: our children. Because there were three of them, and the seats typically came in a variety of 4 packs, and you couldn’t put a kid beside a stranger (scary for everyone involved) - it was the kids and I, with Mike somewhere behind/across. I would be in a world that required packing “in case of emergency” changes of clothes: distributing snack items, keeping ‘voices down’, and trying to change the rubber clothing on the 2” polly pocket dolls we bought (wrongly) in the gift shop. Mike would work on his computer, watch a movie, and then assume vampire position with his noise cancelling headphones, eye mask, and neck pillow to catch some Zzzs. When we arrived at our destination, freshly rested M would launch back into airport sprint mode, and the girls and I - now all over tired, jacked on junk food, and looking like we had been rolled in a back alley - would have to snap to and resume the jitter jog.
No rest for the wicked? No rest for the incurably slow.
your truly,
Cannonball Kate
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[1] I told him that the day his Platinum card came in the mail, would be the same day the divorce papers would arrive. Jokingly, but like most jokes of that nature, with a thread of truth.