Day 294 - Travel Preparations

In 1996, Alex and I were looking forward to moving to Abu Dhabi for three years. I would be the administrative officer (the title management officer didn't start being used until later), I had worked with the Deputy Chief of Mission twice before and respected him very much, I knew the ambassador and looked forward to working with him, and Alex had a job in his field lined up through the efforts of a good friend and colleague from Doha who had moved to Abu Dhabi a year before. We thought everything was set. We would leave in August so we could attend my 30^th class reunion. I had missed my 10^th (I was in Iran) and my 20^th (I was in Germany) so attending my 30^th was important. And somehow I convinced Alex to come with me, even though he had no idea what a high school reunion was about. Those Brits rarely leave home so they have no need for reunions.

Khobar Towers Building #131 after the blast in June 1996

Then, in June, suicide car bombers attacked Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, just down the road from Abu Dhabi. We realized then that we needed to have wills drawn up, and we didn't have a lot of time. Fortunately, I inherited my dad's organizational and archiving genes. The lawyer we contacted provided us with a worksheet that he recommended we fill out ahead of our meeting. I did. Apparently not many of his clients get around to that before the first meeting. With the completed worksheet in hand, he had only a few more questions before he produced our wills.

Because England is about half way between Washington and Abu Dhabi, we made travel arrangements for Alex to spend two weeks in England with his family ahead of my leaving. But because of  government-funded travel regulations, it was cheaper for us to have Alex fly to England and back on a charter flight, and then leave for Abu Dhabi from Washington with me the following day. It would have cost us more than twice the charter flight for him to interrupt the city-pair ticket to allow the stop. It was going to mean twice as much time in the air just to get back to where he started, but the alternative was Alex not seeing his family for another year. So we stuck with the plan and Alex flew to England just after we returned from the reunion in Minnesota.

Image of reconstruction of TWA flight 800 July 1996

Then, on July 17, 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded 12 minutes after takeoff and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York. There were rumors of something sinister that caused the crash, but that wasn't what was important to us. We believed the cause was mechanical failure, and that was enough for Alex to decide he wanted to skip that extra round trip between England and the U.S. and just meet me in London for the rest of the trip. He had his ticket from Washington to Abu Dhabi with him, so he checked out whether he could skip the Washington to London segment. Everywhere he went, he was told to go somewhere else. He even traveled to London to go into the American Airlines office. No one could guarantee him he would be allowed to get on the plane in London. So he called and asked me to get my orders amended.

He really had no idea why that was impossible. It meant getting many people, each of whom had the power to say "no," to agree that changing my orders would be to the benefit of the government. Explaining that it would cost the government less wasn't persuasive. Explaining that he was already in England wasn't persuasive. Explaining that he was in England to see his father who had been diagnosed with liver cancer wasn't persuasive. All those explanations fell under the description of "for the convenience of the traveler." And orders are never amended for the convenience of the traveler (unless the traveler is very, very important, that is).

During my final week in the U.S., there was an explosion in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Olympics. Things were beginning to look grim. But in early August, I left Washington for Abu Dhabi, with a stop in London on the way. I didn't know if Alex would be there. He was. Things started looking up.

We expected that having lived in Doha before our move to Abu Dhabi would mean we wouldn't be surprised by much. But Abu Dhabi had plenty to teach us.

Day 157 - Disneyland

Disneyland image by photographerglen, via Flickr.com

From the day we kids learned about Disneyland, we began planning for our family trip there. Mom got a big piggy bank for us to put our pennies, nickels, and perhaps a dime or two into as we began saving for that trip. In the years we continued our planning even after we moved from one house on Dudrey Court to another across the street, still on Dudrey Court. The coins kept accumulating, but over time, I grew up and thought myself too old to go to Disneyland.

By the time Mom, Dad, and the younger four of my siblings made it to Disneyland, I was through college, married, and living in northern California, closer to Disneyland than ever before, but still too far away to consider a trip there. Years passed until I finally realized that I hadn't outgrown Disneyland. I had just put the dream aside for awhile.

In December of 1972, I put the few things I owned that were too big to fit into my VW bug into the attic of the church in Berkeley where I had worked for the past three years and packed the rest, along with my cat, into the car and headed south to Los Angeles where I planned to spend Christmas with Dad's sister Irene. It was a round-about way to get back to Minnesota before I moved to San Francisco to begin again as a student, this time in graduate school at California State University at San Francisco, but it made sense to head south first because I then planned to head for Phoenix to spend a few days with Mom's parents where Mom and Dad, Joan, Roger, Bruce, and Brian were spending Christmas. I expected to leave two or three days after Christmas for Phoenix, spend a few days there with the family, and then have Joan join me in my car for the rest of the trip to Moorhead. Because I would be so close to Disneyland, I decided to go there the day after Christmas - fulfilling that childhood dream.

Old City of Sana'a by kgbbristol, via Flickr.com

But Dad had other plans. He knew I would be in Los Angeles, and he knew that I had always wanted to go to Disneyland. But he wasn't sure I would make the trip to Disneyland by myself. So Mom and Dad and my four siblings made the trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles the day after Christmas to make sure that I got to Disneyland. We had a wonderful day.

Disneyland has remained a symbol of a dream for me. There is always something in me that can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland. It's as though the real place was just a hint of what Disneyland is meant to be.

image of Yemeni men by eesti,
via Flickr.com

When I was in Doha, Qatar, I recall a conversation with one of my colleagues, Martin, who mentioned a group of people who were planning to travel from Disneyland to Doha. Martin seemed concerned about the trip, giving me the impression that he thought a trip from Disneyland would be dangerous. It was a curious conversation until Martin finally figured out that I wasn't understanding him at all. He was using Disneyland as a code word for a completely different place, a place that we didn't speak of when in most Middle Eastern countries, certainly not over a telephone line. The group of people Martin spoke of were planning a trip to Doha after a stop in Israel. Such a routing meant complications because an entry stamp indicating a stop in Israel in a passport could mean no entry would be permitted into Qatar. Disneyland was used as a symbol of a forbidden place, a curious twist on my thoughts about Disneyland.

image of Yemeni women by
carpetblogger via Flickr.com

The image of Disneyland was very much on my mind much of the time I spent in Sana'a, Yemen. The old city of Sana'a, with its six-story tall adobe buildings complete with gingerbread icing around the doors, windows, and roof lines, conjured up images of Fantasy Land castles. The people walking in the streets of Sana'a seemed very much like fairy tale characters. The men wore the unlikely combination of skirts, sport coats, wide belts with knives tucked in front, and scarves both around their shoulders and on their heads. Many of the women wore very colorful cloths covering them from head to toe with one type of cloth looking like a tie-dyed mask often topped with a straw hat and a tin tray heaped with bags of rice, flour, sugar, or other foodstuffs. In another part of Yemen, the women wore straw hats with enormously tall and pointed crowns, very much like a traditional witch's hat. Living in Yemen was even better than visiting the Disneyland of Anaheim where all the people being visited were only in costumes, not every day clothing, and were paid for performing, not living side by side with those of us visitors.

image of Yemeni woman and child by IRNI,
via Flickr.com

More than 30 years ago, I left Iran, but brought nightmares of the place with me. It took years before those nightmares stopped and were finally replaced by occasional dreams. Less than 15 years ago, I left Yemen, bringing with me dreams of the place that I didn't want to end. In my dreams, I returned to Sana'a Old City's souq where I enjoyed the fragrance of all the spices, along with a few more earthy scents, where I heard the music from the homes above the shops, the chanting of the muezzin in the mosques, where I saw the bright colors of the Kashmir shawls, the coral, amber, turquoise, gold, and silver of the jewelry merchants. Each night as I dreamed of those sights, sounds, and smells, I worried as the quantities of them shrank, reflecting the distance between the real thing and my memories.

Disneyland remains the symbol of a dream for me. I am fortunate to have experienced such varied experiences that seem part of that dream. And I can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland for real.

Day 156 - Canada Day

Independence Day image by Watson
Media, via Flickr.com

This is Independnce Day week. Not only is Thursday Independence Day in the United States, but also today, July 1, is Canada Day, Canada's Independence Day. Where the U.S. gained independence from Great Britain through war, Canada was given its independence from Great Britain in 1867, nearly 100 years later. Some might say the colonies' actions were like those of a rebellious teenager, where Canada's actions were more like a young adult who has earned trust, and therefore independence, from parent England.

Canada was the only foreign country I had visited before my move to Iran. My grandfather had emigrated from Minnesota to Canada before Dad was born to homestead. Several of his brothers also emigrated to the area near Medicine Hat, Alberta. Grandpa Wenner returned to Minnesota but his brothers stayed in Canada. Grandpa's parents had also left Minnesota and settled in Montana and five of Grandpa's siblings also moved there. Three of Dad's siblings followed. So when Mom and Dad took us on trips to visit Dad's brothers, sister, aunt, and uncles, we usually took a side trip north, to Canada, to visit relatives there. Those were the days when citizens of Canada and the United States could cross the border without passports. Answering questions about birthplace and citizenship was all that was necessary.

A few years later, still during the time when most Americans and Canadians traveled across the border on showing a driver's license for identification, I saw the differences between the U.S. and Canada up close. One of those Canadian students of my April road trip, John, asked me to marry him, so I had a few opportunities to travel between the U.S. and Canada. I flew to Toronto several times. I drove to Canada with John after we had both attended the wedding of Gayle and Roger in Pennsylvania. And I drove into and out of Canada with John twice. The contrast between the immigration officers representing the U.S. and Canada on those trips was remarkable,

Canadian flag image by Matzuda, via Flickr.com

I never encountered problems when I flew or drove to Canada. Even my last trip by car, the week before Christmas, when I was bringing a number of presents for John, his parents, his grandparents, and his brothers with me, I was asked few questions, I answered them, and I was welcomed into Canada. But things were never quite so simple on the way back into the U.S.

The first time I flew out of Toronto was after John and I had driven from Pennsylvania to Toronto. Toronto was one of the few airports at the time where U.S. Immigration and Customs officials were stationed outside of the U.S. Passengers flying out of Toronto had to clear U.S. Customs and Immigration before even getting onto the plane. I had no problems with Customs, but when I got to the Immigration desk, I was surprised by the agent's questions and attitude. Perhaps what was suspicious was that I was traveling from Canada to the U.S. on a one-way ticket, not a round-trip ticket originating from the U.S. Or perhaps it was that since I had been living and traveling overseas for so many years it was automatic for me to hand over my passport when asked for identification. Most Americans would have handed the agent a driver's license.

After handing my passport to the agent, he asked me where I was born, where I lived, how I had gotten into Canada, and maybe a few other questions. Then he asked me to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Now I had no objections to reciting it then, and I have none now, but it had been many years since I had recited those words, and I don't think I had ever had to say them alone. In the past, I had had at least a classroom full of other students around me as I spoke those words.

So I started. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Is that enough?" I asked.

"No," he replied.

"I can't remember how the next line goes," I said.

He said, "And to the Republic..." and he paused, looking at me with expectation in his eyes.

"...for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

He stamped my boarding pass, handed it and my passport back to me, and motioned for me to continue. No "Welcome to America." Just a head gesture to indicate I should move on.

The next time I went to Canada, I flew in, but John and I drove out. When we reached the border this time, one of the questions asked was where we were born. For me, that was not so troublesome. "Fargo, ND," I replied. But for John, it was complicated. "Yugoslavia," he said. The agent then asked us to pull John's car over to a covered area to one side of the border inspection station. Once there, other agents asked us to get out of the car and give them our identification. I hadn't learned my lesson yet, so again I handed the agent my passport.

This passport was a normal tourist passport with 24 pages in it, but all 24 pages had been filled with entry, exit, and residence permits for my two years in Iran, my year in Romania, and all my travels in between. As a result, I had had to have extension pages added. These pages were folded into the passport like an accordion. When the last extension page was tugged on, the full set of 24 extension pages pulled out, like a trick done by a sleight-of-hand card dealer. Once the agent did that, he walked away from me and to a desk, picked up the phone receiver and started dialing.

At that point, other agents had removed everything from the trunk of John's car and were about to begin removing the side panel of the passenger door. I walked to the desk where the agent with my passport was sitting and explained to him that I had so many stamps in my passport because I was a teacher of English as a Second Language and that I had just returned from Romania where I taught on a Fulbright fellowship at one of the Universities. I also explained that John and I had met there while he had been a graduate student of ethnomusicology in Romania.

I will never know if he had already gotten information from whoever was at the end of the phone or if my explanation was somehow so overwhelmingly helpful that he was convinced John and I were not illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, Serbian terrorists, or simple identity thieves. But he did hang up as I finished my explanation, and he shouted over at the guy with the tools ready to take John's car apart that he could stop now. The agents put our bags back into the car and let us drive away.

Again, I don't think there was any "Welcome home."

So to all my Canadian friends, Happy Canada Day. Your country always made me feel welcome. I hope mine has done the same for you.

Day 141 - French Words

image of Eiffel Tower by wlappe, via Flickr

One similarity between the university system in Romania and in the U.S. was that there was a break between sessions around the end of the calendar year. It wasn't referred to as a Christmas break, just the end of term. And there wasn't much incentive for me to stick around in either Iasi or even Bucharest, so I made plans to travel to Paris and Yugoslavia. I had friends living in both places, a strong incentive for picking them as destinations.

When I mentioned to the French lecturers that I planned to travel to Paris, one of them, Lionel*, suggested I practice my French with him before I went. I told him I didn't speak French. He looked at me sideways and paused thoughtfully, after which he said, "But surely you speak French words." After giving it some thought, I realized he was right. My French repertoire consisted at least of the following words and phrases.

Conversational Phrases

• Bonjour. (Good day.)
• Bonne nuit. (Good night.)
• Au revoir. (Until we meet again.)
• Tres bien. (Very good)
• Adieu. (Farewell)
• Comment allez-vous? comment ça va? (How are you?)
• Merci beaucoup. (Thanks very much.)

Clothing and Cosmetics

• beret (hat)
• chemise (blouse)
• pantalon (pants)
• jaquette (jacket)
• haute couture (high fashion)
• parfum (perfume)

Food

• pain (bread)
• gâteau (cake)
• biscuit (cookie)
• chocolat (chocolate)
• orange (orange)
• limon (lemon)
• coq au vin (chicken in wine)
• pâtisserie (pastry)
• quiche (quiche)

Adjectives

• petit (small)
• grand (big)
• blanc (white)
• rouge (red)
• noir (black)
• bleu (blue)
• beige (beige)
• violet (violet, purple)
• brun (brown)

Phrases

• Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? (Oh, come on now, don't try to tell me you don't know what this means.)
• chassez les femmes (chase the women)
• influence d'argent (influence of money)

Then Lionel pointed out the additional French words that I knew, perhaps without realizing I knew them, because they are also Romanian, Spanish, or English words, borrowed from French.

• cadeau (cadou in Romanian, gift)
• hier (ieri in Romanian, yesterday)
• the names of the days of the week

And suddenly the light went on. I could speak French. With Lionel's encouragement, I added a few more words and phrases:

• Parlez-vous anglais? (Do you speak English?)
• Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français. (I'm sorry. I don't speak French.)
• Vouz avez [fill in the blank]? (Do you have [fill in the blank]?)
• Je veux [fill in the blank]. (I want [fill in the blank].)

Armed with overconfidence, I decided I could travel to Paris and make my way around with ease. I made plans, contacted my friends Shellagh and Bill who I met in Tehran before Bill was transferred to Paris by his employer, IBM. Shellagh told me how to get from the airport to an area near her office where she met me and showed me how to get to their apartment by metro and bus. After a quick lunch, Shellagh went back to work and I set out to explore.

Using my French words and phrases, I managed to accomplish the following all in that first afternoon: I brought a pair of boots to an atelier de réparations de chaussure to arrange to have the heel that snapped off as I got off the bus in Iași at the train station replaced, I brought a film to a boutique de photo to turn in a film to be developed, I made an appointment at a salon de coiffeur to have my hair cut, and I found a boutique that advertised l'anglais est parlé ici so that I knew I had an excellent opportunity to make myself understood as I looked for new clothes.  I returned to Bill and Shellagh's apartment that evening with a new dress, a black velvet pant suit, as well as the hair appointment and arrangements to pick up my repaired boots and developed prints the next day.

The rest of my stay in Paris, I toured the normal places: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmarte, Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame, Champs-Elysées, Centre Georges Pompidou. I took photos. I spent hours in front of artwork in museums, reading the titles to figure out more about the French language. It was helpful that most paintings had descriptive names, not just Untitled.  Riding the metro and buses offered more language learning opportunities. I got pretty good at figuring out the meaning. I still had trouble speaking and understanding when others spoke.

After Christmas, I flew from Paris to Belgrad, Yugoslavia, where I caught a bus to travel to Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous region of Voivodina which is entirely surrounded by Serbia. A friend from San Francisco State University, George, had been at the university there for more than two years as a Fulbright lecturer. My roommate Annie and I had previously visited him from Iran on our trip at the end of our first year in Tehran. George invited me to join him at a New Years' Eve party with his colleagues and some of their students. I thought I could try out some of what I had learned about speaking French words while in Yugoslavia. After all, I had studied Russian at Concordia, so I thought I could make some sense out of Serbian through its similarity to Russian. Serbian uses the same Cyrillic alphabet as Russian, and I had had that earlier trip to Voivodina to build on. So imagine my surprise when one morning while listening to the radio, I heard the announcer say, "Ora este ora unsprezece," Romanian for "The time is now 11 o'clock."

That put thoughts of trying to learn more about Serbian and get back to Romania to concentrate on that language.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 136 - First Class

train image by kev_bite, via Flickr

I had an unusual schedule in Romania. I had classes only Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, leaving me with long weekends every week. And since Iasi was only a provincial capital (read the equivalent of a county seat in my thinking, quite similar to my hometown of Moorhead), I saw the long weekends as my opportunity to travel to the real capital, Bucharest.

There were two ways for me to travel, by train or by plane. And for reasons that I didn't understand, the price of a plane ticket was less than the price of a train ticket. So I flew often.

The single flight to Bucharest each day left in the late morning, when the sun was still shining and the fog had lifted. The train left late at night and arrived in Bucharest, when there weren't delays, around dawn. The return flight from Bucharest was in the late afternoon, before sunset because the pilots had to be able to see to navigate. There were no instrument-guided flights. The return train also left at night. So while I could usually fly from Iasi to Bucharest, I often had to swap my plane ticket for a train ticket on my return as the Bucharest to Iasi flights were often cancelled because of overcast skies.

There was just one class on the planes. I don't think there was even any name for the class, it was just flying. But the "trip" began before we got on the plane. The only way to get to the airport as to take the bus from the downtown Tarom ticket office downtown. I suspect the reason was simply expediency; not many people had cars, so a bus to the airport was about the only was to get there. There might just have been an element of "security" to this arrangement, too. No one had a reason to have to know where the airport was if the only way you could get there was by having someone else drive. I give some credibility to the notion that security was a factor based on the throughness of the screening of passengers before we could board the plane. Of course, since then, screening of passengers has become almost as intrusive in the U.S., but always in the name of security.

The fight from Iasi to Bucharest was only about an hour. The train trip was closer to eight hours. While there were no separate classes on the plane, there were at least three classes on the train. First class had two bench seats, facing one another, one side of which could be converted into sleeping berths to accommodate two passengers. Second class had two bench seats facing one another, both sides of which could be converted into sleeping berths, accommodating four passengers. And third class had two bench seats, accommodating six passengers who were lucky if they could get any sleep sitting up the whole trip.

When I traveled by train, I usually went second class. There was plenty of room for four passengers and I could usually avoid conversation - my Romanian was not conversational quality; i could ask directions and figure out what was said so long as the person used a few gestures to accompany the words - by bringing something to read. But one time, I bought a first class ticket. It was a good thing, too, because on that trip the train was delayed by about four hours. I was used to getting up from the sleeping berth just as the sun was rising and just before the train rolled into Bucharest's North station. But on that occasion, the sun was already up when the porter came through to make sure we were all up, and I could tell from the view out the window that we were still miles away from Bucharest. I had just one fellow passenger in the compartment, and I am sure we passed some pleasantries, but there was no conversation. We both got ready to get off the train and we just waited for it to arrive.

On that return trip, I traveled second class. And I ended up in the same compartment as my first class companion from the Friday before. And that is when the big difference between first and the other classes became clear. She was the same person. I was the same person. But the trip was very different because instead of leaving me in my private world in the first class compartment, she wanted to talk. She asked me question after question, none of them suspicious or curious; it was just conversation. Where traveling first class gave me privacy, second class demanded involvement from me. But it wasn't too difficult as the conversation ended once the sleeping conversions were accomplished and we all crawled into our berths for the remainder of trip.

I don't think I ever set out to test this further, but I did end up once in a third class compartment. I am sure it was the result of there not being any available seats in first or second class. That experience demanded even more conversation and involvement since there were no sleeping berths. I think I may have been able to doze a bit, but I recall having my Romanian skills tested pretty seriously on that trip. I concluded that third class meant the ticket included entertainment - conversation with the other passengers.

I always found it curious that there were classes on the trains in Romania at that time since the communist system emphasized the equality of all in a system where everyone took part in mundane community activities such as sweeping the streets and going off to the collective farms during harvest to help gather the crops. It was called patriotic work. All the students at the university were expected to take part. I suspect all the teachers also took part, although the foreign lecturers were not expected to do so. The fact that everyone took part in the work was something I found admirable in a way. It meant that it wasn't possible to know if the person wearing the blue dust coat sweeping the street was a surgeon, a university professor, or a laborer. And I think that meant that everyone was equally respected or disrespected. I am a "the glass is half-full" kind of person, so I chose to see it as respect.

Day 56 - More Flying

Image by mauren veras, via Flickr

I spent most of yesterday in airplanes or in airports waiting for my next airplane. So I saw a lot of people, inspiring stories of what brought these particular people together at that particular time and place. Lots of fodder for future 365 Project pieces.

But the person who left the biggest impression on me is someone with whom I spent the shortest length of time: the flight attendant on the 20-minute flight from Los Angeles to San Diego. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about her just rubbed me the wrong way.

The first event that drew my attention to her was when the woman across the aisle asked for an extender. Now I will admit that I had no idea what she meant by the word, but then, I don't work for an airline. The flight attendant also looked at the woman as if she had just spoken to her in Greek, so the woman clarified that she wanted an extender to the seat belt so that she could hold her child on her lap during take-off. Now that the attendant seemed to understand. Her response: "Oh, no, we don't have such a thing. That is not allowed. That just isn't possible. The child will have to sit in his own seat." And she hurried away down the aisle.

That seemed funny. If there is no such thing as a seat belt extender, why would the woman ask for one? Maybe other airlines provide them? Or maybe they are available on larger model planes? The attendant's response didn't ring true.

Then we moved into that portion of the flight when the attendant rattles off what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing and so on. Usually I can sleep through those speeches, or recite along with the speaker. They are so predictable and boring, except on Southwest Airlines when they are stand-up comedian-worthy. But this attendant had a tone to her voice that came across condescending. I wanted to get up and punch her. I am not sure I could replicate her intonation pattern. It was a little sing-songy, with her intonation rising and falling in an exaggerated pattern, like a kindergarten teacher reading a fairy tale to her class. Really, really annoying,

The flight was so short, that we barely got off the ground before she was back on the public address system telling us to shut down all electronic appliances, bring our seat backs into the full and upright position and return the tray tables to their locked positions. And that is where she irritated me yet again. Apparently not everyone paid close enough attention. She was back on the system again in a few seconds to repeat herself after first stating that apparently not everyone had heard her the first time. This time the sing-songiness came with a slight giggle that she seemed to think softened the edge. It didn't.

I closed my eyes as the plane began its descent so I didn't see her when she came up behind me. I just heard her say to bring the seat back up. I turned around and told her I had never lowered my seat. She laughed, OK maybe it was a nervous giggle, as she pointed to the man in the seat next to me to say he was the one who hadn't returned his seat to the upright position. Now I hadn't talked over my impressions of Ms. Attendant with my seat mate; he seemed quite comfortable in his own bubble. His reaction to her appeared consistent with mine however. He said nothing. But his eyes did. Ms. Attendant did all the seat adjusting while reaching over me, giving me a more up-close look than I wanted.

By this time, I thought there was little more she could do to add to my impression of her. But I was wrong. The plane was on the ground. The captain had reminded us to keep our seat belts fastened until he had turned off the sign. Most of us were following directions well, just like well-behaved kindergarten children. But then I heard her voice once more over the loud speaker. "Keep that child in his seat." It wasn't a suggestion.