A Million Miles of My Town

Last year I received a fancy set of luggage tags from American Airlines, along with a gold colored frequent flyer card because, the accompanying letter explained, I’d reached a million miles flown with them (or the airlines they’d bought over the years) since I’d signed up with the program. A million. Holy crud. A million miles is nothing to my husband, who used to travel for a living, thereby racking up so many miles with the airline his business uses that we flew his entire family down for our wedding party without putting a dent in the pile, but for me….

And still, I find myself typing this on yet another American flight, this one in the belly of a 757. We were delayed, as usual, this time for weather. I can’t remember my last flight that actually took off and landed on time. One or the other, yes, but not both. (Oddly, I think it might have been a few years back on Alitalia, which, as anyone can tell you, is an acronym for Always Late In Takeoff, Always Late In Arrival.) And don’t tell me it’s worse these days, because if you do I will know you walked barefoot five miles to and from school every day as a child. And it was uphill both ways. Yes, security is a bigger pain in the tush now, but flights have always been overbooked, overcrowded, and delayed. Other travelers have always been inconsiderate, loud, and often stinky.

It’s true that airlines have cut back to the point of no return--you pay for your own peanuts, you even pay for your luggage (American’s guilty of starting the luggage thing, but everyone will be doing it soon enough). So you can’t distract yourself by watching the cart come down the aisle and wondering whether there will be meals/snacks left on it when it gets to you--if you want to eat, you’d better bring your own. (You should bring your own anyway; if your flight is stuck on the tarmac for four hours the way mine was a couple weeks ago, do you really want to be sitting there without anything to nibble? Or maybe you do…the Tarmac Diet™, anyone?) The outrage over “they aren’t even feeding us” seems rather trumped up to me, since back when the airlines did feed people all you heard was how the food was completely inedible. Really, meal just served as entertainment.

I must admit to having become a bit jaded after years of traveling for business and pleasure. I won’t stay in a hotel that’s not 100% non-smoking (beware any hotel that doesn’t state up front that the whole building is smoke free--smoke comes up through the air vents and lingers in drapes and carpets), I expect that the car rental place will not have the car I asked for, if they have a car at all (the reservation isn’t a guarantee), and I expect all my flights to be delayed. And yet I still like to look out the window and see the clusters of puffy white clouds on the dark blue sky from above.

Besides, an airplane is the only place left where people aren’t allowed to use their cell phones. Although I fly with earbuds to insulate me from the squalling babies, that knowledge gives me a certain perverse satisfaction.

My Town Monday--for which this post only loosely qualifies, but how many of us have traveled a million miles in our towns?--is a product of the fertile and febrile imagination of Travis Erwin.