Timothy and I started hunting through the shows on my screen when the plane ran into some turbulence. I’d never been a fan of roller coasters. Even mad rides in the small cars at amusement parks seemed unfathomable to me. But here I was bouncing around and clinging once again to Timothy’s hand as if he had the power to correct whatever was wrong with the plane.
“It’s just a little turbulence,” Timothy kept saying. “It’s only the air currents, and the pilot knows how to fly us through them safely. No worries. It will be over in a minute.”
All around me, people were bobbing about like toy balsa boats in the current. No one was screaming or acting in the least bit frightened by the jet streams that Timothy was babbling about. And, just as Timothy had said, the turbulence soon settled down, or else our pilot had flown us through it. I let out a big sigh of relief and released poor Timothy’s overly squashed hand.
Then, as if nothing onward had occurred, we resumed our search of the monitor’s offerings and finally found a comedy series, which we watched for a few minutes. It was funny, and I hadn’t seen the show before, but I was in an airplane, up in the air, and it seemed much more important to peer down at the ground and take in all that was happening around me.
For instance, the people sitting near us, bottled up inside this capsule, were all strangers mixed and seated among other strangers. Like being in an elevator, trapped and pretending that you didn’t see those standing next to you. How could anyone relax when the person beside them was an unknown — a CEO, a famous physician . . . a murderer.
What were these people feeling and thinking? Didn’t being surrounded by so many mysteries bother them? And where were they going? Who would they be meeting at the airport? Were the passengers visiting relatives, traveling for business, or returning home? Were they happy about that? Was it the start of a vacation or the end of one?