Back East

I’m sitting in seat 4D, an isle seat, in West Jet #512.  We’re flying at 31,028 feet in the clouds heading to Toronto.  I was hoping to get a window seat so that I could look at the flooding in Saskatchewan and Manitoba as I did two summers ago, but as I hadn’t bothered to choose my seat in advance, I was lucky to at least get an isle.   For one hopeful moment I thought I might be able to move to a window seat in the row ahead because there was nobody in it, but the stewardess said that it would cost $45.00 because those are the expensive seats with more legroom.  I opted for saving the money and watching the ravages of flooding on the CBC television news.

 Mo and John drove me to the airport.  We had breakfast together at Tim Horton’s and then they left and the fun began.  The buckles on my sandals set off the alarm at the baggage control so I had to walk out and back through the scanner arch barefoot.  I then repacked my backpack after having removed my laptop for inspection and carried on to the departure spot with just enough time to go to the washroom and line up to board.  As I was flying in Canada, I didn’t expect to have to show id.  Wrong.  Fortunately I had brought my BC license so was able to show that.  But the name on it is Janet and my ticket was in the name of Jan.  Three years ago, this was the problem that the woman who issued my BC license after a long procedure of applying for and producing birth and marriage certificates had warned me about.  “ You should not have this confusion of Jan and Janet in your papers.” I had dismissed her comments as being a bored bureaucrat’s lame attempt to instill fear in me and add an element of importance to an otherwise repetitive task.  Now I was discovering that whether she was bored or not was beside the point; one should never underestimate the capacity of the system to force one into consistency.  I had to go to another desk where another woman took all my stuff, changed the name on my ticket in the computer, issued new tickets, tore the baggage stub off my original tickets and handed me everything.  No real problem, but a bit of a production.  Now I’m happily sitting in the air conditioned if a bit cramped comfort of an economy West Jet plane.  We have already crossed the Rockies and most of Alberta.  It was all cloud covered but I’ve been watching our progress on the little map on the screen on the chair back in front of me.  Yikes!  The big man sitting there just pushed his high priced seat back and almost jammed my laptop into my stomach.  It’s changed the distance between my eyes and the screen, so my progressive lenses are not correcting my vision of the screen as well as they should.  Perhaps I should have paid the $45.00 to upgrade. 

I guess I’ll shift to reading a complicated kindness by Miriam Toews.  As usual I’m reading a book that most people read years ago.  It’s an outrageous adolescent take on a Mennonite community.  Nomi is a female Holden Caulfield.  She’s very perceptive and the book is often funnier and quirkier than Catcher in the Rye , but they are both a bit too self-conscious and contrived at times for me.  Maybe I spent too much of my life teaching kids that age.  I always find them entertaining but tiresome after more than about one  hour’s exposure.  I’m reading the book in one hour blocks and finding it very funny and well written.