Recently, I flew from Incline Village (Lake Tahoe), via Reno, to Dallas on my way to Omaha.
I thought the flight from Reno to Dallas was bad (I was literally the last passenger off the plane in Dallas since I was in the widow seat of last row) but even that did not prepare me for the next leg of the flight.
I was waiting for my connecting flight in Dallas when I noticed this group of screaming children and wondered how the Mom could handle such unruly kids. She had two girls and one boy that I guessed to be at the ages of 5, 4 and 3, respectively. It was mainly the youngest of the three children (I'll call him Lucifer) that seemed truly out of control. The oldest girl was quite well behaved and she watched the brother with what seemed to be the level of embarrassment and contempt reserved for a teenage girl toward her parents. I guess I could call the oldest girl Angela, but keep in mind everything is relative.
The younger sister vacillated between angelic, as she copied her older sister, and wicked, as she mimicked her younger brother. The brother was getting so much more attention than the older sister, however, that she was leaning heavily toward demonic. She wasn’t Angela, but she wasn’t exactly Lucifer, either.
I will just call her Luci.
I felt bad for the Mom and wondered if she was traveling alone or if her husband was just in the bar, numbing his nerves with a drink. Mom was handling the three kids on her own. Angela would walk ahead of the pack while Mom pushed an overloaded double-wide stroller containing the two youngest children and enough bags to make the tires look woefully under-inflated.
About 30 minutes later, after waiting at the gate for an hour, I discovered they moved the connecting flight to A 34, a gate seemingly a half mile away. Peeved, I trudged obediently to the new gate. I suppose it seems common for airlines to frequently delay or cancel flights, change times and gates, and in familiar fashion, generally fuck with the passengers for no apparent reason. Naturally, I was annoyed. Frequency and familiarity don’t make acceptance any easier. It probably goes without saying that tornadoes are common in the Nebraska, but we are hardly excited when our homes and lives are in direct path of an oncoming twister.
I honestly didn't think much more about the mother and her spawn of Satan until I saw them about an hour later when they also stopped at gate A 34. Even then, I was still in denial about the probability that they could possibly affect the remainder of my flight.
Stupid me.
When I finally boarded, I found myself in an empty five-seat row with seats A and B to the left of the aisle and C - F to the right. I was assigned seat F, the window seat. Things were looking good and I was nearly asleep in my seat before they even boarded, and that was the extent to any rest I would experience. The plane filled quickly and then the family boarded and took the remaining seats in the row.
She was a thin, stylish, Scandinavian looking Mom and wore something akin to a leaf patterned knee-length summer dress and I noticed the boy wore rubber Pixar "Cars" shoes. Kid’s Clogs. I saw no husband. It turned out that if she was still married, her husband either wasn't on the trip or he ditched them in Dallas.
For her good behavior, Angela was awarded the other window seat and her sister, Luci, took the aisle seat next to her. Mom took seat C, left of Lucifer. Lucifer wanted a widow seat like his oldest sister and flipped out and wailed when he got stuck in the center seat next to me. And I mean he wailed like an air-raid siren.
I wanted to turn to him and yell back, “Trust me, Diabolo, I’m not happy about this either.”
After they finished settling into their seats I was secretly hoping they would all get thrown off for being so disruptive. Simply seating themselves disrupted the entire central section of the plane and took what felt like 10 minutes. I eyed the stewardess call switch above me and thought about jabbing it like a morphine drip button.
I began trying to devise a plan of escape as Lucifer kept screaming at an impossible volume and pitch. I never imagined Satan wailing like a banshee and wondered if I should change my nickname for him to something else.
I briefly thought about awarding Lucifer the window seat. Certainly people around me had expressions on their faces as if to say, “Just give him the damn seat” but I wasn’t born yesterday. I was fully aware that could put me between the mother and her demon spawn. Granted, it seemed to follow that she would probably take the middle seat and give me the aisle, but that would still put me in the dead center of the family. Plus, although the oldest behaved like an angel, I was a reluctant believer. Her sister Luci continued to waffle between good and evil as she watched her sister and brother behave and misbehave, respectively, moving deftly from amiable to cranky in the blink of an eye.
No, Luci was not to be trusted.
I concluded that if I awarded Lucifer's outrageous behavior with a window seat, Luci's M.O. would have been set for the rest of the flight. Not to mention that it was reasonable to assume the Mom was actually afraid I might reward him for his behavior and she could have been secretly hoping I would not interfere.
She would have to ask me to relinquish my seat.
I looked ahead and behind to evaluate remaining seating availability. I am fairly certain a guy two rows behind me was giving me the look that had "you-poor-bastard" all over it. I am sure he noticed the panic in my eyes. I half expected him to raise a fist of solidarity in my direction. I would have raised my clenched hand in return, but I fear I might have also teared up, and I needed to remain strong, so I looked away.
I had noticed an opportunity to move to the row in front of me once the stewardess secured the doors before takeoff, but unfortunately I realized too late that a guy two rows ahead and in an aisle seat was thinking the same thing. His strategic location on the aisle gave him a jump on the seat and as he settled in I saw the next two hours of the flight pass before me. It was a frightening sight.
If I wasn’t already distressed enough, I was horrified that just before the plane took off the Mom carefully opened an air sickness bag and meticulously placed it at her feet.
I suddenly felt very anxious. While she was doing this, the boy punch-slapped her to get her attention. I don’t mean he simply slapped her arm. It was a clenched fist and he cocked his arm way back, twisting his whole body with his elbow as he prepared to deliver his blow. I think I actually recoiled. She barely flinched.
When she finally pulled out a portable DVD player shortly after we reached cruising altitude I became a little more relaxed. However, it is hard to remain truly relaxed when you have been getting incessantly kicked - hard - by Lucifer all flight.
There was better news as Finding Nemo began playing on their DVD player about 10 minutes before the gorgeous jellyfish scene. As expected, they had seen Nemo so many times that they could watch it sans audio. It was a good turn of events performed by a seasoned Mom.
Luci sat in her Mom’s lap with the DVD player on the tray in front of them with Lucifer tugging at the player so it faced directly at him. Every time Lucifer turned the DVD so that only he could see it, and Mom simply redirected it so Luci could see it as well.
For the next hour, the boy continued to scream - first that he was thirsty, then hungry, then upset Mom wouldn't hold his pretzels in the palm of her hand, as if presenting a treat to a tiny wild bird. And so on, and so on.
The only thing that broke his screaming and whining was an abrupt moment of gentleness. To me, such a sudden change in demeanor in a child is often a sign he or she had just done something wrong. Very wrong.
After it was pointless for the Mother to inquire, she asked Lucifer if he had to “go potty.” He replied simply "no" but he might as well have said "Why bother at this point?"
I just reclined my seat back and turned my head out the window. I tried to take in the beauty of the clouds. It was a short flight, but as Einstein famously pointed out, time can be a very relative thing.
Lucifer kicked again and I looked up at the buttons above me as I calculated the remaining time before we landed. I so badly wanted the stewardess call button to actually be the morphine drip button I imagined it to be.
