The Flight (part two)

We hadn't even left the ground before the excitement began. The plane was moderately full and it seemed that everyone had boarded; the waif blonde Bostonian girls in North Face fleeces were bidding goodbye to their boyfriends and lamenting the fact that they could not enjoy that night's Red Sox game together. The cropped haired polo shirt sporting Bostonian guys were checking out the waif blonde Bostonian girls. And I sat in my window seat eating a luna bar and not judging anyone, obviously.

Then a bit of commotion entered the plane. It came in the form of a haggard middle aged woman and her husband, both in oversize football shirts, both stinking of whiskey, and both, particularly the woman, belligerent. Whatever interactions she had had so far with Jet Blue had not been to her liking, and she thought everyone should know. She kept a running commentary going throughout the safety demonstration, and the pilot's introduction, and got shifty eyed looks from the stewardess every so often. Still, it seemed we were going to take off with her on board, much to the consternation of the waif beside me. We bonded over our mutual dislike of the situation, as most of our neighbors seemed to be doing.

The plane stayed put. The belligerence continued. The stewardess gave another shifty eyed look and went to talk to her colleagues up front. We all sat and waited, on edge. Finally a burly man in uniform appeared from the back of the plane and went to squat beside the woman, his hand on the back of her seat. She was surprisingly co-operative; where I would have expected crescendoing belligerence, there was merely some disappointed mumbling, an abject look toward the rest of the plane when she stood, and then she and her husband were being escorted away.

The relief was palpable. We all chattered excitedly to each other while the stewardess swaggered back up the aisle.

"What did she say to you? What was she on?" Were some of the overheard questions, which the stewardess relished answering, perching on the side of the seats to tell her tale. She was a sort of younger, more buxom Helen Mirren, and she looked like she'd thrown a few people off a plane in her day.

My superstitious nature was already amplified, considering how worried I was over making the wrong general life choices, and the whole incident had filled me with a sense of doom. It began to dissipate a little as I bonded with the waif over the events transpiring, and we taxied to the runway in the sunset, the lights of the buildings of Boston twinkling against the pink and blue velvet skyline. A music video by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals was playing, and I was feeling pretty good.

Then we took off into a blanket of fog.