“Cooties” at 30,000 feet

As if travelling in a sardine can wasn’t bad enough, I’ve begun to feel like a Venus flytrap – susceptible to every germ and microorganism able to survive at 30,000 feet of compressed cabin air.

I’m no germaphobe, but on my last airplane ride I couldn’t help but feel bad for the passenger in the next aisle because he seemed in grave danger of becoming infected with something worse than cooties.

For two hours I could hear the passenger next to him as he coughed, wheezed and snorted his way through the flight. Although they were separated by one seat, I could tell that he wished that he was somewhere else because he only used half of his seat the whole time. He was leaning so far over he was practically in the aisle.

Near the end of the flight, he dispensed with any pretense and was using his paper napkin to cover his mouth – the best defense he had against the onslaught of flying phlegm. But the embattled passenger was way too busy emptying his sinuses to be offended.

I could see him glancing my way (hoping for sympathy, maybe?), because I knew he wasn’t asking to switch seats – but I avoided his gaze even though I did feel his pain.

Actually, there were several similarly affected passengers on the flight because there was a cacophony of flu related noises all over the cabin.

I’m aware that you can book extra room on certain flights these days. But I don’t really need all that. I don’t care about business class or first class for that matter. I don’t care if they’re serving food or just drinks. I don’t care whether there’s an in-flight movie or not.

I just need me a flu free flight.

We celebrate Valentine’s Day – Now and then

For quite a few years now, my husband and I have not visited a restaurant on Valentine’s night for the obligatory dinner, because frankly, we can cook a cheaper meal at home.

I’m a girl who loves to dress up and go out, and staying in does mean that dishes have to be done after we eat, but where’s the fun in sitting down in a too-tight dress and looking around at all the other people who en masse decided to take somebody else’s word, that it was the second best night of the year to go out to dinner.

If I’m to be completely honest, though, our tradition came into being by accident. Valentine’s Day invariably fell during the week, and our babysitters just weren’t making themselves available, so although my sister-in-law once took her daughter along in her car seat to a romantic dinner with her husband, we decided to stay home and make our own fun (and food) instead.

My husband cooks quite well, so with a menu of food items that we have only once in a while, some soft music, a few glasses of wine, an early bedtime for the little one, we were set. When the second child came along, we just decided to make it a family affair, with the baby in her car seat and the four year old with his own place setting.

I guess as the years pass, you become a bit more practical and you make adjustments where necessary. I’m not saying that romance goes out the window, but I have to get up to go to work the next day.

But lest you think that I don’t appreciate a romantic gesture, there’s one that my husband made one Valentine’s Day BC (before children), that I won’t ever forget.

Saying that he had a surprise for me, he asked me to stay in the bedroom until he was ready. I was aware, since he wasn’t in the house that the surprise was happening outside, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a new car.

Finally he was ready. When he came back inside, I was surprised to see that he was sweating bullets – and having long since proposed, I didn’t know what all that perspiration meant. I wasn’t pregnant, was I?

Across the road from our house was an empty lot. And there on the grass were about forty small paper bags lit with votive candles that had been placed in a heart formation. I took his word for it, because it was probably more obvious when viewed from the air. My first thought was “what a beautiful thing to do”. My second was, “Lord that was a ton of work – no wonder he was sweating”.

Since those were the days when we paid to eat dinner on Valentine’s Day, we got ready to go. But since we didn’t want the neighbours to think that we were irresponsible – or worse, engaging in the dark arts – we made sure to blow out the candles before we left.

Looking Forward to the Past – A Movie Review

Image credit: Wikimedia.org

“Some people have a problem dealing with the past”, says Judy Dench’s character in the movie “Philomena”, in which she plays the title role, as a retired Irish nurse who decides that the time has come to confront her own.

Based on the book, “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee”, written by a former BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith, the movie tells the story of a mother who decides to look for the child who was given up for adoption 50 years ago.

But it’s more accurate to say that the child, a product of an unwed teenaged mother and a passing boy, was not so much willingly given up by the convent-bound mother, as he was sold to an American couple who wanted to adopt a child.

The mother’s search for her son was fuelled by several desires on her part. First was to know whether he was still alive and whether he was well. Two of her greatest fears was that he turned out to be homeless or worse yet – obese, due to the eating habits of the people of his adopted homeland.

But I think that what she really wanted was to know the kind of person her son became. Most of us who are able to raise our children, do so with the intention of imparting important values.  We get to show and tell them the right things to do. Our love and guidance all contribute to the people they become. She never had that opportunity, and along with letting him know that she never gave him up, she wanted to know who he turned out to be.

The nuns at the convent that had been her home decided to erase the shameful history of the Roscrea Abbey by burning all the records pertaining to the adoptions that they took part in for years. And the Sister-in-charge, while still alive, refused to consider that maybe the punishment meted out to the girls didn’t quite fit the crime. How do you look in the face of a past 50 year old woman now, and tell her that you still believe she deserved exactly what she got back then?

But what I thought was the main character’s unfathomable penchant for finding excuses for those who did her wrong, was really her strength in finding it in her heart to forgive. And like the reporter who helped her find her son admitted, I probably couldn’t do it either.

In the end, she never did get to meet her son, as he was again taken from her – this time by death. He became a successful lawyer, and she comforted herself with the fact that his opportunities would not have been as great had he not been adopted. But her greatest consolation must have been knowing that in requesting that he be buried in the land of his birth, he had not forgotten her – or his past.

Good Guys Finish First or “What did you just say to me”?

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl again this year – not even the half-time show (sorry Bruno Mars), so I also didn’t see the commercials that air whenever there’s a break from the action. But as usual, the commercials that stood out because they were funny, touching or smart were highlighted the day after.

I happened to see the makers of two commercials – ordinary people whom we later learned have a desire to be in the entertainment business – who got a foot in the door when Doritos continued their commercial-making contest which promises the winner and the runner-up one million dollars and five hundred thousand dollars respectively. And of course, visibility beyond their wildest dreams.

As I’m sure we’ve all seen by now, the winning ad showed a boy fooling off an adult with a time machine that looks like it was built from the box that your refrigerator comes in. We think he’s just playing along until the jig is up and we realize that adult really wasn’t acting the fool – he was one.

But I loved it. That kid obviously picked the right back yard to play in.

And then I saw the ad that won second place. The mother arrives home and her arms are full with two bags of groceries. Her two boys are playing in the front yard. She asks whether she can get some help to carry the bags. And one of the boys, busy relaxing on a recliner involved in a video game, says, “I don’t know. Can you?”

Well Lord. Look at trouble. Had I done that then, I wouldn’t be writing this now. And even though I will admit to being a more lenient parent than the ones I grew up with, even I know that such a response would mean that somebody had better start running – away from home. If, my mother went into the house without saying anything to me, I know that she’d be coming back out with something else that would have me speaking in tongues.

However, the minute that the mother tries a quick bribe by letting him know that a taste of Doritos is off the table, the little ingrate finds his feet and is running towards the vehicle to claim the bag.

But the smaller boy, dressed as a cowboy decides that this impolite behaviour on the part of his older brother cannot go unchecked. So he calls his dog, mounts him and lassoes the bag of chips right out of his hands, ties the brother up and eats the damn chips himself. Because rudeness should get you nowhere in this life.

And for that alone, the mother who designed this commercial should have won first place.

Maternal Instincts – Movie Review

Image credit: hollywoodreporter.com

I’ve said before that the two occasions on which the main players look their best – at weddings and funerals – are the same occasions when the rest of us can look our worst. I guess there’s something about celebrating the beginning of a new life that a marriage is, or the ending of another through death, that causes some of us to act out.

That’s one of the impressions that I was left with after viewing the movie, “August: Osage County”. Secrets are uncovered, plain speech is discovered, and a daughter takes her mother down as she attempts to find the pills that she’s convinced are the cause of her mother’s mean-spiritedness. So no, it’s not the feel-good movie of the year.

The family members gather to attend the funeral of a man who committed suicide, it seems, because his life had become unbearable. Living with a wife who was suffering from mouth cancer but who still insisted on having her smokes, one wonders if her strong mouth and caustic speech was what drove him to take his life, because something else had already driven him to drink.

The three mothers in this film wouldn’t exactly be called nurturing, but that’s probably because each had her own demons to contend with.

The widow, thought that it was the perfect opportunity to tell her daughter that she broke her father’s heart when she moved away from home. But while she pushed the father out front, it was obvious that the daughter never showing up to give support to her, was only one of many hurts.

The widow’s sister-in-law considered her only son a disappointment to her and all concerned, but it was likely that since she’d been dancing with guilt for years concerning his paternity, she never really saw her son – only her mistake.

And the widow’s daughter, who was herself the mother of a teenaged girl, seemed unwilling to take any of the responsibility for the fact that her child was well on her way to disregarding her own mother, and continuing the cycle of blame.

The end of someone’s life causes most of us to reflect on our own lives, and the characters in this movie probably did this in spades – and none of them was happy with what they were seeing.

Unfortunately, when our lives that generally hold so much promise at the beginning, show no such sign of it at the end, we would probably agree with the main protagonist when she says, “Thank God we can’t tell the future – we’d never get out of bed”.

Canned Sardines

My husband tells a story about the time that his father was travelling on a small plane that developed engine trouble.

Faced with the possibility of having to bail out, his father spent some time scouting an escape route while still in the air. He thought that he would be able to survive if the plane went down near a certain island, allowing him to swim to safety.

I found myself doing something similar when I took a plane recently. The tops of the trees looked pretty close, but I knew that it was still a long way down – to the ground.

The story about my father-in-law demonstrates his sense of optimism. But in my case, I was already lamenting how close we would have been – and yet so far – from our destination if something untoward was to happen. Pessimistic, I know.

I hate flying. And as I get older I like it even less. If I could take a bus to get to New York I would, but it’s kind of hard to get off this island without taking a plane.

So the one ritual that I have (besides prayer), is that I always make sure to watch the flight attendant as she does the safety spiel. Every time. Even though I’ve seen it a million times before.

But I always wonder how many of us would really remember what to do “in the event of an emergency”.

You know when she says that the light from the life jacket will “illuminate on contact with water”? How many of us know that by the time that happens, we are well and truly screwed? I know for sure that I’d be blowing the hell out of that whistle to “attract attention”. But I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody paid me any mind at all. Anyway I might be too busy experiencing hypothermia to even care.

I’m amazed at the science of flying, but since even a stair stepper gives me vertigo, I don’t think that I’ll be coming back as a pilot in my next life.

Somebody described a plane as a sardine can flying through the air – for all the protection that it doesn’t provide. But maybe it is true what they say about flying being safer than driving a car – because I’ve actually been in more than one car accident, but never in one involving a plane.

A few years ago, on a particularly bumpy flight, my husband and I were sitting behind a woman who hated flying more than I did. I consider myself the aviophobic equivalent of the quiet drunk. So even though the plane dips and shudders when flying through bad weather, I stare stoically ahead, or keep my eyes glued to my paperback, reading the same line over and over again. But I’m quiet.

The passenger in front of us was just the opposite. Whenever the plane dipped and cavorted, she would grip the hand rests tightly while praying loudly to her Jesus, always ending His name with a sibilant “s”. It was still funny after the fifteenth time, and since I knew how she was feeling, I could empathize with her.

I love to visit different places, so flying will always have to be a minor bump along the road to getting there.

But I’ve never looked at sardines in quite the same way again.