A need to connect: Unsolicited wisdom from me and unsolicited poetry offered to me …

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I speak to or even see my friends each day thanks to technology both old (telephone) and new-ish (online video conference). Most of our conversations are about how much we do not like this or about what we are doing to occupy the time.

Since I am a disabled and retired person anyway, certain facts of my life remain unchanged in quarantine: the availability of time combined with its rapid disappearance each day. Others are new: I do not drive and I reside too far from the nearest anywhere to walk there (my town is mostly shut down now, anyway), so I have no command at all over travel. Mere weeks ago, I could reach out to a friend and ask if that friend planned to drive past my neighborhood and could I grab a ride to town. If not, I could reserve a cab. I could walk around town for however long I might want. That day will come again, but that loss of independence (when I think about it, like I am now) is one I feel acutely.

The acceptance of that loss has been a fairly straightforward one to make. My friends mostly live quite near, so the video conversations, while welcome, are a little surreal, that over-used word. Again, if I think of it, it is surreal, so I do not. I realized yesterday that other than my housemate/landlord (with whom I travel to the grocery store), I have not seen a person whom I know in person since this began weeks ago.

When I think about it, as I am now, I feel that absence acutely, but we all feel it, each in his or her own fashion, so it does not weigh me down like a burden. So far. My need to connect has come out in these little exercises on my web site here and on long comments on different peoples’ Instagram posts. That has been a weird, but perhaps welcome by the recipients of my unsolicited “wisdom,” symptom of how I respond to disconnection: I forge connections.

Once upon a time, I traveled … not a lot when compared to some, but almost enough to apply for frequent flyer miles. My family did not travel much when I was a kid, so the novelty of air travel always remained a novelty.

I traveled alone, always to a destination, and I possess one of those faces that other people respond to as a face they ought to talk to. I have no explanation for this, and I never developed the radar to know when an unsolicited conversation was about to strike.

One passenger started one with me mid-flight one afternoon. He was a writer, that much he made certain I knew. A poet.

I never looked for his book online or in a bookstore. He showed it to me, or he showed me a galley proof of its cover. And now, almost two decades later, I do not remember his name or enough about the book to find out whatever happened to him or it.

The two of us were passengers on a plane, and 98% of my personal air travel history dates from the years 2000 to 2004, when I moved from upstate New York to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and twice a year I returned home for holiday visits. The typical route was: Eastern Iowa Airport to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport to Stewart International Airport (or sometimes Logan in Boston), because there are no direct flights between Iowa and anyplace else I have ever lived. The book author was a wadded-up sheet of paper’s direct flight across the aisle from me.

Sometimes I am a tense passenger, one of those fliers who grips the armrests so tightly that I may as well finish the job and break them off, pocket them, and carry them home as souvenirs from the journey just completed. But sometimes I am almost relaxed and almost human.

Air travel offers an intensification of experience; one deals with emotions not often felt on the ground, from the fear of permanent change to the excitement of temporary change. For me, it has not yet become a natural mode of transportation like being in a car or a train or on foot. (I think I prefer being on foot.)

I have experienced emotions in airplanes and in airports that I have not encountered elsewhere in my life. Once upon a time in an airport, (during my flying-to-and-from-Iowa years) I realized that I had fallen in love with a woman about sixty seconds too late for this love to effect any permanent change in my life. More correctly, the thought crossed my mind that I ought to have gotten the phone number of the woman with whom I had been chatting from Logan Airport in Boston to O’Hare in Chicago, a two-and-a-half-hour flight. (She looked like Sandra Bullock and we completed the New York Times crossword together.)

When she and I parted, when she said she was about to walk to her next terminal and I realized that I was already at mine, we gave each other a look I have not seen since. It wasn’t a broken-hearted gaze exactly, but it was leasing a condo in disappointment’s neighborhood. After all, we had enjoyed talking with each other nonstop and now our time together was permanently over, which is an awful lot like forever … and we both knew it, unless one of us would simply say or do … something. That was the look. Neither one of us did anything. It was a stare for a moment that two people who had proved themselves glib and witty did not have words for.

I almost missed my next flight in an indecisive wander around O’Hare while in a silent internal debate over whether I should run after her “just like in a movie” to the terminal that I thought was the one she had told me her next flight was leaving from. (If you do not know this, O’Hare is too large an airport to be indecisive in.) The quotation marks around “‘just like in a movie’” were quotation marks in my mind even then, which is a good indication that my indecision was not to be regretted, was not truly regretted even then, even in the moment.

(In the life I live now, any so-called missed opportunities are now perceived as having been opportunities themselves. Each one was the opportunity to live the life I now have.)

Back to the poet across the aisle from me. He first attracted my attention because the book in his hand was The 9/11 Commission Report, which had just been published that year and which did not strike me as an enjoyable in-flight time-waster. (My personal in-flight book preference is forever limited to happy stories of enjoyable things that happen to contented people on the secure ground, ground that is described clearly and with a lot of detail about how it rests under sunny skies and nowhere near cliffs, volcanoes, or airports.) He replied to my glance at the book cover with a statement-question: “I want to learn everything I can, right?”

I nodded with no change in my facial expression at this, which was sufficient reason for him to continue to speak to me. “I’m a student and I study everything,” he added. I looked out my window.

There was only sky out that particular window, and there was only ground out his window across from me, which is a vehicular angle that planes often hit but buses and cars and trains and human legs do not—not without terrible trouble, anyway—a common in-flight experience that I happen to vertiginously detest, so I made the snap decision to completely enjoy this one-sided conversation with the self-declared student-of-everything-who-studies-it-all. I was only going to look at him, with nary a glance at his book or out either window, until we landed.

He was young, bearded, an earnest hipster a couple of years before this was a thing. (Three decades too late or a decade early can be an admirable thing, in either direction.) Perhaps he was the very very first neo-hipster. He was as serious as those who believe things are serious can be. Gosh, he was unrelenting. This was just what I needed in my moment of panic.

Pages materialized out of a briefcase. “I’m a writer,” he told me. “With a book coming out.” On the pages were poems. Well, they looked like poems; there was a lot of white space around them. He watched my eyes as they moved across each line and down the page. I realized that I could not pretend to read them. I exaggerated the movement of my eyes to look like a cartoon typewriter: “Ding!” He did not offer a second page until he could confirm that I had consumed the first. “Ding!”

They were poems. Indeed. Each poem was loudly violent, with “pleas rejected” and “eyes unfeeling” and “thoughts unsmelt.” (I may have mis-remembered that last one.) These poems could not have been less interesting. Thus, for me in that moment, these poems could not have been more perfect. And they were being published in a book with an actual price on a real cover–which was another sheet he made sure to show me, the proof sheet of the cover.

Perhaps the fact of his imminent publication did it. I got a little jealous. I found myself in the psychological and social trap of trying to include myself in someone else’s monologue. With him not asking me anything about me, I informed him that I was a writer, as well, which at the time I was: a professional technical writer. He nodded with no change in his facial expression at this and not a pause in his monologue and then he told me about his publisher’s plans for his poems.

My one sentence, “I’m from New York but I live in Iowa now,” yielded five sentences of his ongoing explanation about how Capital L Life works and why people do not understand the importance of it all. Five to one was the ratio through the entire conversation. I have the sneaking suspicion that, as with Ms. Sandra Bullock of O’Hare Airport, I remember more about my encounter with Mr. Poet-Across-the-Aisle than he does.

I still sometimes feel the defensive need to insert myself in other peoples’ monologues when I am near them, but I no longer pursue it.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 17 asks us to reflect on the word, “Distance.”

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