TO BE CONTIBUED part 6:

A TALE OF FLYING …

We have stalled in the vortex somewhere over UK. It s my fifth and last stop in a week. My ticket, my FlyAmeirca roundpass expired yesterday after having flown crisscross domestic America for 5 days because that more or less was the only way I could get something to eat.
Not before I land in London will I know if I can actually make it to Denmark, my hope is I can make a timely call to my bank and make them open my VISA. On my right an overweight fat americana have been sleeping for the last 7 hours straight. I sit in the middle annoyed by my long legs, that cant find any rest. My feets are killing me with sweat and fungus that has hit like a thief at night. The boots I bought secondhand for my last cash in Minneapolis seems to small, but I had to buy them as I hadn’t considered the fact that October is winter in Minnesota but not in Vegas. It felt like my feet had grown two sizes after having warn noting but sandals for two months. On my left, in the windowseat sits a weelkept middleage woman who has tried to strike up conversations with me, but my situation as such is all reluctance.

“Is it your first time on plane?” she asks and looks at me, worried.
“No, it cant very well be can it?” I reply, degrading, but hey, it could have been, so I immediately excuse my tone.

Dinner is served, and I try to finish a meal of: Chicken, cordon bleu, over cooked broccoli. Somehow I am nervous to come home. My meal lies wasted, spread out, greasy and messy on the serving tray.
She on the other hand, it seems, have made it into a science eating on planes. She has a 100% overview of the meal, the way its structured and packed and foiled, the rationality, functional logic.
”It is like a game of chess” she says “everything is a matter about being conscious of the rules.”
First she had opened the main dish on the plate, she took of the foil lid and placed the 4 room plasticplate on top. She then took knife and fork from the little bag, and left the rest of the service in it. The side dish, the pasta-salat is then opened and eaten while she leaves the main dish a while “for cooling of because they have a tendency to overheat the food trying to keep it warm enough to make it for the whole serving of the plane. And”, she says with emphasis “then subsequently I can use the pastacontainer for leftovers. As I always travel economyclass I consider it a duty to eat everything that is served free”:

With the pasta salat away she makes room for the desert before starting the main dish. “Its essential” she says “to be able to keep the whole meal on the serving plate.”
When she finished the main dish, which she eats calmly, she takes the rest of the service from the little plasticbag. Wet-tissue, sugar, spoon, and toothpicks. Then she downs a glass of OJ in one go, and signals the stewardess.
Before she starts eating the dessert she meticiously gathers the little trash left from the two first meals, and wets her finger and vacuum the plate and the table for crumps.

The empty pasta bowl now sits in the empty dessert bowl. They are of the same size and “they constitute exellent minature- trashcan” she points out.
The dessert, a little pudding with cherry sauce that shakes as only gele-like substances can shake because of turbulence. Turbulence which means that I can hardly hold anything on the serving tray, or any of the food in me. But her timing is sharp. Just as she takes the first bite of the pudding with a very even amount of cherry sauce, the stewardess emerges with a smile and one question: “Tea or Coffee?” It is perfect. Her, consuming the meal seems to be one continuously movement.
She prefers tea from coffee, and a calvados. She pauses for a bit after having finished the dessert and then unwraps the cracker and a small piece of cheese from a bag, before she puts the sugar and sturrs the tea, and then finally puts the teaspoon in the bag it came.
“I got to have somewhere to put the spoon” she syas and continues “the question now is n o t to think of smoking a cigarette. I have in fact stopped, because my job means I fly a lot, but anyways…Do you smoke?”
I cant answer it. But hell yes, I smoke. I can`t answer it, because I am in no mood to explain the complexity of my situation. I havn`t smoked for days, but hell yes, I smoke.
“Did you know that an individual swallow approximately 300 times during a meal?” she asks, clean and full, and smiles wide at the stewardess as she takes her perfect orderly tray away.

We land.

I call my bank in Denmark, for money I bummed in the transit-area. When I finally gets through the bankier remembers my name, but seems baffled, and in the background I can hear a John Denver tune playing from a radio.
“He is dead” she says.
“Who is dead?” I ask.
“John Denver”.
“Oh god, I didn’t know that. How?”
”In a plane chrash” she answers and coughs just enough so she cant hear me giggle, or my relevant question about the possible reopening of my VISA account. The connection then fails.

I so miss the sound of bare feet slapping over my apartmentfloor.