When I got to Vaclav Havel airport one Thursday morning in early August I was probably unrecognizable. This was mostly due to the smile I was wearing. It’s very rare that I am smiling in an airport.
Oh, it’s not the fear as it once was. No. It’s seems I’ve traded in my terror of being 7 miles above earth in a flying death tube for an intense dislike of being in airports. Airports involve running, sweating, being delayed, being groped by paid agents, and being near other people. Besides a hefty enjoyment of a good grope by a strange, I hate all of those other things.
But this trip involves something I have virtually no experience with: a direct flight.
In the 22 years I’ve been getting from Prague to Philadelphia twice a year, it has always almost every single time involved two flights. This means a whole other airport. It means the possibility of a delay, which in turn means the possibility of a missed flight, which in turn means the possibility of a longer time in an airport, which in turn means being near more people.
No thank you.
But a direct flight means I get on one plane and when I get off that plane I’m where I want to be. Not Frankfurt, Paris, or London. I’m in Philadelphia. This means a whole airport full of people that can’t get to annoy the hell out of me with their whole being human thing.
I’m in row 12 on the aisle. I am sharing a very tight, three-seat row with a married couple in their 40s. I share a few, constipated words with the woman that tell me they don’t intend to be chatty. This is very fine with me. Her husband sits on the window. He’s wearing a good-natured smile and gym shorts that thirty years ago would have pegged him as a slacker but these days makes him like everyone else. We catch each other’s eye and I decide on a harmless joke about the tight seats to set the pleasant tone. This will let them know that, even though we aren’t going to be friends, they should feel free to get up and use the bathroom anytime.
“Boy, they have us in here like cattle.”
The man smiles and chuckles. “Prague is a beautiful city.”
I can’t decide if the man has misheard me dramatically or if he’s letting me know he doesn’t want to converse. Before I can mull this over and conclude, a shriek draws my attention. It’s a child shriek, so like most adults, I am slinking back into the shadows and hoping someone else will deal with whatever is going on.
The situation in a nutshell: A little boy might not be able to sit with his mom and is terrified. The mom it seems has opted to not get three seats together to ensure that she will be able to sit with her two children. Instead, she has opted to rely on the kindness of strangers – aka, the cheaper option. She now seems very distraught, but not distraught even to have considered her kid’s feelings when she was buying the ticket.
“He’s a little boy, he can’t fly alone!” intones a woman judgmentally from four rows away. It takes me a moment to realize that that woman doesn’t in any way work for the airline. She’s just a passenger with an opinion. A loud, unasked-for opinion. Something dawns on me.
“She’s a Karen!” I say to my seat companions.
The woman nods into her book.
The man smiles at me. “Our daughter studies at Villanova.”
“Huh.” Can’t figure this guy out.
And then more dawns on me. Not only am I experiencing a Karen in the wild, I am also experiencing another recent social phenomenon. There has been an alarming trend of people demanding that others give up their seats for someone else. Often it’s a child who wants to be closer to a parent or guardian, and for whom, evidently, this consideration was not a factor in the seat-purchasing process. So then it’s up to a random stranger – one, by the way, who bought tickets as well – to give up their seat. If they don’t, well, then, we shall judge them.
The woman is acting quite perturbed. Again, I feel compelled to point out that she wasn’t perturbed enough to buy the seats she needed, just perturbed enough to garner the sympathy of a stranger who wishes their seat was in another part of the plane.
The people in front of her will not give up their seat. She sighs dramatically. The man on the aisle tells her and the steward that as long as they can find him another aisle seat, he will gladly move. The woman thanks him and engages him in conversation, seeing him as the way out of her predicament. In the end, someone behind the woman moves and the boy is tucked safely near his mother.
There’s no clear-cut villain here. Plane tickets are insanely expensive these days and they nickel and dime you to boot. Want two bags? Sure, that’ll be $120 more. Three bags? Well, I hope you are comfortable with two mortgages. But I can’t help but wondering what she would have done had someone not given up their seat. Why is it part of the social contract now for us who aren’t traveling with kids to ensure the comfort of those who are? For this I blame the woman, but in a very casual way.
I wish a small pestilence upon her. Nothing big – especially because we’re on the same flight. Just a minor annoyance. A stale dinner roll with her chicken meal. A faulty earphone plug.
My prayers are answered when the man who had offered to give up his seat has opened a line of discussion with her. He’s been in Prague on a mission from God. Literally. He ran a religious-aligned camp for Czech and Slovak kids. And he wants to tell her all about it. It’s clear that the woman – who has now gotten what she wanted – has no interest in hearing about anything the man has to say. She reacts to his benignly tone-deaf stories with one-word answers and active-listening greatest hits like grunts and a few noncommittal oh yeah’s, is-that-right’s, and ah’s.
Ha! I think as we start heading towards the runway. Enjoy about 8 hours of that!
I catch the man’s eye and smile at him. He smiles back.
“Why were you in Prague?” he asks.
I think fast. “I’m quite partial to winter, in fact.”
He squints in confusion but is too good-natured to push forward. I look at the couple in my row. The woman smiles into her book. The husband winks.
“Genius.”
