in the aeroplane over the sea

My old man works for United Airlines. One of the perks of his job is that he and his family get free air travel to pretty much anywhere. I'm sure i dont have to explain the greatness of this to anyone. The only problem with it is that my parents were never very adventurous. We used to go to Hawaii once and sometimes twice a year when i was growing up. I was on Maui so much as a kid that i knew where to find a moray eel in this one spot, and where this one turtle liked to hang around, things like that. I don't want to make it sound too bad (because it wasn't at all) but the underside of this was that I knew stupid shit like that the hard rock cafe on maui cooks their hamburgers too done so you have to order down. At a certain point it started to occur to me that as nice as Maui is, there are other places in the world. When i brought this up to my parents, they took us to the big island or kauai. Really, though, i wanted to go to europe or asia or anywhere. Eventually i got old enough to travel on my own, which opened up some pretty impressive doors for me. No longer encumbered by my parents allotment of paid time off, nor their dependance on expensive hotels, i became sort of the ultimate bum. free airfare to anywhere in the world but only my allowance to spend when i got there. this lead to some pretty absurd situations. Since this free travel was on standby basis, i sometimes got stranded in at O'hare or Dulles or De Gaulle for days at a time. It got to the point that getting stranded was little inconvenience to me. I would bring CDs and books and would make a camping trip of it. I knew where all the best food could be had in airports. I knew all the best deals. Eventually, i realized that no one could actually tell whether i was at the airport to catch an airplane or not. I had a pocket full of "write your owns" (literally i had blank tickets that i just had to write the destination and origin on and i was off) and no one could tell me i wasn't at the airport to catch a flight, because if they gave me any trouble i could just board a plane and jet. The thing is that no one ever gave me trouble. In the days before American fear, i was an accepted part of the fabric of air travel. Thus, airports became my hotel. Eventually, airplanes even became my restaurant. One time i was stuck in Chicago and had no money. I was headed back to San Francisco but was having trouble getting on a flight. In order to get a hot meal, i boarded a flight to Dulles just to get the in flight food. I got first class, ate poached salmon and was given an entire bottle of bordeaux by the flight attendant (i was 18 at the time). when i got to dulles, i caught the next flight back to O'Hare; just in time for dinner. I had about 40 cents in my pocket.
When i started college, i wanted to get far away from my home in Fremont California. I moved across the country to Boston University. It was a bittersweet move for me. I was separated from my highschool girlfriend (who i was still trying to date and who moved to Spokane Washington) by about 3000 miles. Fortunately, i was able to fly to see her and my friends at home pretty often. I would ditch friday classes and fly to spokane or san francisco overy other weekend or so. The jetliner became the conduit for my affection; it's cabin, my sitting room, where i pined and burned for the woman who i knew would one day be my wife. It was there, as well, that the totality of my broken heart was realized when i was assured that this was not the case. Thus, the cabin of a jetliner became the source of all that was romantic, all that was free and alive.
As the nest has emptied for my parents, they've stopped going to hawaii all the time. they've gone to italy, germany, france, austria, china, you name it. It warms my heart. I wish they had figured that shit out when i was a kid. Mom and Dad just came back from a trip to Switzerland. On the flight over, an old couple boarded the plane and sat across from my parents. Sometime during the flight, the older man started to have trouble breathing. A doctor was called for but there was nothing that could be done. The man died somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Since there is no place to store a corpse on an airplane, the man was left sitting in his seat, his wife still holding him, as the warmth and color and life slowly drained from his body. She didn't cry or anything. She just held on to him.