There are things I notice and I’m
not sure why. Two months I took a
plane trip to Wellington and I was very excited. I hadn’t been on a plane for close to ten years and this
flight would only last 45 minutes.
I felt like an astronaut. I
imagined I was doing something nobody had ever done before, that nobody could
ever do. I was going to be in the
air, in that sky above me. I would
be doing something absolutely un-human – flying in the face of gravity. There were others on the plane but I
didn’t care. The pilot, the girl
who gave the instructions, the other passengers . . . irrelevant.
But they weren’t irrelevant. I was trying hard to contain my
excitement. I wanted to
communicate to my fellow passengers that I was seasoned, I was a veteran, I had
done things and I wasn’t phased. A
woman appeared at the departure gate and I strode toward her with my boarding
pass. She asked me to go back and
wait until the gate was open and the control desk was being attended. I tried to make sure that nobody had
seen me and the my cover had not been blown. I took a seat in the waiting area and tried to look cool and
relaxed.
It seemed like an age before I
was finally sitting in the plane looking out across the wing. I couldn’t stop smiling and was
fighting the urge to look around the aircraft, to touch things and try things
out. I took the coffee, and the
biscuits and the cup of water and the lolly to suck on and I read all the magazines
and the in-flight instructions.
Why? Because it was there. And then the plane landed. And I stepped out of the plane and walked
across the tarmac like somebody important who’d just done something incredible. And I
had. I’d sailed in a tin can at
40,000 feet and made it from Hamilton to Wellington in 45 minutes. Anybody in a plane should always have something to write home about.
No comments:
Post a Comment