“Okay,” June said, “I found you an aisle seat!”
And guess what happened when she announced that. Go ahead. Guess. That’s right: THE SUPERVISOR STOPPED HER AGAIN.
“Wait, what?” Rand said. “Why can’t I—”
“Not. That. One,” the supervisor said, and walked off. By now, we’d attracted the attention of the other ticketing agents, and a few passengers. People were exchanging looks with one another.
Rand stared at me, his mouth half open.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“Psychological experiment,” I whispered, and turned back to June.
“Shall we try again?” I said. Then I smiled brightly and, catching the supervisor’s eye, gave her a little wink. This did not improve the situation.
June nodded. At this point, I think she had something to prove. A few minutes later, she found us another seat, and, rather wisely, whispered her findings to me.
“I found another seat—but it’s a window.”
“That’s fine,” I said, and handed her my credit card. I looked around—the woman had been called away.
I kept my voice low.
“Since she’s gone, is there any way you could upgrade him to Premium Voyageur?”
“Um…”
“There are seats available, right?”
June nodded. “Yeah,” she said and tilted her head over where the woman had stood, “but she doesn’t want me to give you them. And if she finds out I did…”
She frowned at me, nervously. Understood. This was June’s career we were talking about. We’d been terrorized by her supervisor for a few moments. She dealt with it every day.
“It’s cool,” I said.
I turned to Rand.
“Babe, you’re going to Paris alone. In economy. If you make it through alive, you might be stronger for it. But odds are you will return a sad and broken man.”
I handed him the ticket June had just printed.
We began to leave—I was going home, Rand was going to Paris, a day late, and many, many dollars short.
“STOP.”
It was June’s supervisor.
“Now, what?” Rand snapped.
“You need to weigh your bag,” she said.
“I already did,” Rand said. This was true. When we’d first arrived, June had placed the bags on the scale. Everything was fine.
“You need to weigh it again.”
Rand stared at me. I shrugged. There could be no harm, right? It wasn’t as though his bag had gotten heavier while we’d been standing there.
“Just weigh it again,” I said, gently patting his forearm.
Rand placed his carry-on back on the scale.
“It’s too heavy,” she said. “You’ll need to check it.”
I feel it pertinent to note that Rand had a specific fear of checking his bag on Air France, and for good reason: the airline doesn’t remotely care if your bag arrives or not. On one return flight from Europe, we checked our bags, only to find that Rand’s (and not mine) was inexplicably left behind at Charles de Gaulle Airport because, to the best of our understanding, the baggage handler loading the plane didn’t like the color of it.
Of course, no one told us this, and so we were left standing at the baggage claim in Seattle, patiently waiting for a bag that never arrived. We finally went to the counter to see what had happened and they snapped at us.
“We’ve been paging you for twenty minutes,” they said, exasperated. This was a vicious lie. I’d been listening very closely to the PA. They had not been paging Rand Fishkin. They’d been paging an individual by the name of Flopsy Bugmittens.
So, naturally, Rand was a little nervous to check his bag again. Especially when it met the weight restrictions.
“No,” he said, firmly.
“Excuse me?” the supervisor asked. This, I realized, is what she’d been waiting for.
“I’m not checking my bag,” Rand said, and he started to walk away.
“THEN YOU AREN’T GETTING ON THE FLIGHT!” she yelled.
I’d like to think that even Gandhi lost his temper now and again. That for all his nonviolence and passive resisting, there was one thing that could make him positively lose it. Like someone leaving just one tiny, unusable scrap of toilet paper on the roll in the bathroom, so that they didn’t have to change the whole roll.
Everyone has their hot buttons. Things that infuriate them, regardless of how calm and understanding a nature they usually possess.
And for Rand, the thing that causes him to totally lose it, even more so than bringing a hand grenade to Easter dinner, is a senseless abuse of power. Also, having to check his bag.
“FINE,” he said.
The woman smiled, satisfied.
“Fine, you’ll check your bag?”
“No,” Rand said. “I’m not getting on the flight.”
I really wish I had had my camera out, because the expression on her face would have made for an awesome, if confusing, Christmas card.
“Babe,” I said, gently. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “This is insane.”
I walked up to June and handed her my credit card again.
“Can you please refund our most recent ticket purchase?”
She nodded.
All eyes were on us now, and I suspect the supervisor had realized that she’d gone too far. In a blink, she disappeared through a rear door.
“Crap,” Rand said. “I have to call Paris.”
I nodded and sent him off. It was now just June and me. I told her how much I appreciated her help and thanked her profusely.
“But your supervisor is a sadist,” I said. “And I need to know her name so I can file a complaint.”
June nervously looked over her shoulder, and, sure that no one was watching, smiled slightly as she told it to me.
It’s been years since these events transpired. To share her name with you now would be petty and childish.
It was Elizabeth.
She is five feet three inches or so, with dishwater blonde hair. My memory fails me, but I think her eyes were either blue or blood red. If you are flying Air France out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, I recommend that you pack some holy water in your bag should you encounter her. Be sure to make it less than three ounces, TSA restrictions being what they are.
A few minutes after Elizabeth disappeared, we left as well. Rand and I stood on the curb outside the airport, enjoying the sun, and feeling not all that disappointed about not being in Paris. Will had graciously agreed to deliver Rand’s presentation for him—and it turned out he was fluent in French, to boot. So the Paris conference-goers had to suffer through an informative and entertaining presentation delivered by a devastatingly handsome Brit.
“What now?” Rand asked. I smiled. I knew exactly where we were going.
Being on the road as much as we are, we miss a lot of things. Birthdays, weddings, baby showers, the occasional bris. On that particular night when we should have been traveling to Paris, our friend Jamie was having a birthday party.
I’ve found that, proper etiquette aside, when you RSVP “no” to a party and then show up unexpectedly, people are often delighted to see you. It helps, of course, if they are already drunk, you are wielding two dozen cupcakes, and there is a story to be told.
The Mandarin Gate Chinese Restaurant and karaoke bar sits in a strip mall in North Seattle, just off Aurora Avenue. A mile south is the rather affluent neighborhood of Green Lake, and a mile west lies Carkeek Park, with its sweeping views of Puget Sound. But the stretch of highway where Mandarin Gate is located is known mostly for easy access to drugs, prostitution, and venereal disease.
It is not, one could safely say, the most romantic of places.
Nor can I speak to the quality of food served at the establishment. The drinks, judging by the quantity consumed and the presumed buying power of the clientele, are affordable and the pours are generous.
The back bar, which is
open long after the kitchen has closed, is a sea of white linoleum and chipped paint, all bathed in the soft glow of the rainbow Christmas lights that hang limply from the walls. At one end of the room sits a small but inviting stage.
On the night when we should have been in Paris, we found ourselves here, celebrating our friend’s birthday, along with a cast of people who I presumed were Mandarin Gate regulars, seated at the bar, their backs to the room. At the center of all this Rand and I sat, surrounded by friends, eating cupcakes and trying to explain why we were still in Seattle.
People would occasionally rise from the table, either alone or with a conspirator, whenever their names were called, and head toward the small stage.
Depending on the song, we’d sit and watch and cheer, or sing along, or get up and dance.
At some point, our friend Sarah took the stage. Standing up there, her blonde hair floating around her as she moved back and forth, belting out perfect notes, it might as well have been Broadway.
Except that she was singing the Smiths.
It was a song I loved, a song I listened to constantly around the time I first met Rand. Every now and then, when we’re flying and hitting a spot of turbulence, I hear the lyrics in my head and take his hand.
And if a double decker bus
crashes into us
to die by your side
is such a heavenly way to die.
I suppose it’s easy to see why the tune appealed to my sensibilities. I can’t escape my worries. The bus is always barreling down toward us. Rand sees it, too, but rather than panic, he tells me that everything will be okay, and I start to believe it. He might be wrong, but he’s usually right. Either way, he’s there, by my side.
As Sarah sang, perfectly and dramatically and to the delight of everyone in that back bar, I found myself next to Eric, her husband of less than a year. And as he looked at her, he smiled and said to no one in particular, “That is my wife.”
I think about that moment often. And about the countless other moments I’d missed while I was frantically running off somewhere. Eric plays his cards close to the vest, and it’s only if you pay very close attention that you see exactly how in love he is with my dear friend. I was the only one that heard him say those words that night. Had I been in Paris, maybe no one would have.
One by one, the regulars at the bar came alive and walked up to the stage.
Then came Richard. He’d been sitting quietly at the bar since we’d arrived. He was middle-aged and barrel-chested, his white hair slicked back against his head. Upon hearing his name, he stood, grabbed his sports jacket off the back of his chair, and shrugged it on. And as he passed our table, straightening his lapel, he winked at me.
In a few moments, he was channeling Barry White, belting out “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” with such a booming resonance that the walls shivered. Rand took my hand and walked me to the makeshift dance floor at the center of the bar. As we swayed in the pink light, he glanced at his watch.
“Our plane just landed at Charles de Gaulle,” he said.
I laughed and pulled him close.
“I do so love Paris in springtime,” I said.
He immediately began to apologize.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I lost it like that.”
“It’s cool,” I replied. “That woman was nuts.”
“She was. How on earth did you stay so calm?”
I shrugged.
“It was just my turn, I guess.”
The instances are few and far between, but every now and then, he and I are given the chance to switch roles. When life becomes just a little bit too much for him, in a way that it almost never does, I remember all the comforting things he’s said to me, and I repeat them to him. I look at the bus that is heading straight for us and I tell him, calmly, that everything will be fine. I make things right. For a brief moment, I get to be the best person I know. I get to be Rand. And he, poor fool, has to be me.
It has to be that way. If you both panic, you’ll both be miserable. And if no one does, you end up with explosives at Easter Sunday dinner. It is the law of the conservation of matter and Newton’s third law of physics. It is what holds the planets in orbit around the sun.
The night that we should have been in Paris, we were in a karaoke bar in North Seattle, dancing under rainbow Christmas lights and helping to keep the universe in perfect balance.
7
MARRY SOMEONE WHO WILL HELP YOU DEAL WITH YOUR SHIT
MISSING THAT FLIGHT TO PARIS taught me something important: you don’t even need to set foot on an airplane to have an epiphany about your relationships. You can learn a lot about someone without going anywhere. Some of my biggest revelations have happened while trapped in incredibly close quarters. Occasionally with a malfunctioning toilet.
Sharing in the sheer panic of a poop tsunami can teach you a lot about your marriage, and about yourself. It’s like couple’s therapy but with a much higher risk of dysentery. Because, see, love isn’t just about cleaning up other’s people shit. It’s about finding someone who can help you deal with yours.
Don’t I sound positively authoritative? Like Dr. Phil, only more crap-obsessed? That’s the problem with having a blog: people start getting the mistaken impression that you are somehow an authority on what you’ve chosen to write about. That you actually have a clue. At some point, readers may even start soliciting you for advice. This is incredibly dangerous for everyone involved. If enough people start believing that you know what you are talking about, you might start believing it, too.
I do not wield this power wisely.
Once, while Rand and I were walking in downtown Seattle, a middle-aged couple pulled over and asked us where they could find a liquor store. Rand began to tell them that there weren’t any liquor stores nearby, which was true, because he has this nasty habit of letting facts get in the way of his helping people.
That’s never been a problem of mine. I chimed in that there was a liquor store just down and over a few blocks. The couple listened intently as I gave them very specific directions that were entirely incorrect.
They thanked me and drove off, and we continued on our walk, a slight spring now added to my step. I was downright pleased with myself.
“I can’t believe I was able to help them,” I said, delighted.
“Yeah,” Rand said, somewhat skeptically. “I didn’t think there was a liquor store down here.”
“Of course there is—we went there the other day to grab a soda—Pete’s or whatever.”
“Pete’s?”
“Yeah. The place on the corner, with the big green sign.”
“Wait… you mean Ralph’s?”
“Yeah…” I said, the chipperness falling out of my gait. “Ralph’s, Pete’s—whatever. The point is, it’s a liquor store on 3rd.” So I’d gotten the name wrong—they’d still find it.
“It’s not a liquor store.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s a grocery store.”
“Well,” I said, all confidence draining out of my voice, “they have liquor, too.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Oh.”
“You told them it was on 3rd?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not on 3rd. Baby, where did you send them?”
According to Google Maps, my directions could have landed them either at the Jewish Community Center or a Moroccan restaurant, and to this day, I comfort myself with the thought that probably, maybe at least one of those establishments sold booze.
“If you knew my directions were wrong, why didn’t you stop me?” I asked.
“Because you sounded so… so confident.”
I have no idea what became of that couple. Odds are, they probably gave up, headed home with some takeout Moroccan, and had a nice, quiet, disappointingly sober evening. But some small part of me is convinced that they are circling those blocks down which I sent them, doomed to spend an eternity yell
ing to each other, “It must be here. She said it was here. And she sounded so confident.”
The point is, asking me for travel advice is a terrible idea, and it will ruin your marriage, if not your life. And yet I still get people emailing me, wondering which hotel they should pick for their visit to Bulgaria (short answer: don’t go to Bulgaria).
They email me about other things, too, like love and marriage. But here is where things differ: even though the basic rules of properly interacting with strangers utterly elude me, and I occasionally lead innocent couples on a road to nowhere, I am pretty sure I’ve managed to figure out this whole happily-ever-after stuff.
I figure even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so why can’t this stopped clock have a successful relationship?
What time is it?
IT IS BLISS O’CLOCK, YOU FOOLS.
Whenever I am asked about it, I always give the same response: if you want to be absurdly happy, marry someone you love whom you can spend time with. But most importantly, marry someone who can help you deal with your shit.
In the spring of 2011, a little more than two years after I’d started my blog, we found ourselves in New York City once again, and I was about to become acutely aware of how true my advice was and of how well my dear husband helped me deal with mine. Because there, in a tiny room in an environmentally conscious hotel on 47th Street, a series of events transpired that I could not have handled alone. We would, when searching for the specific words to describe the gravitas of the situation, come to describe it as A-pooh-calypse.
A-pooh-calypse began innocuously enough, as all disasters do.
We checked into our room and found that our green, LEED-certified accommodations looked more or less like any other hotel room, except that there were fliers all over the place telling you precisely how many owls and leatherback turtles had been spared in the creation of the hotel.
In the bathroom, I found a bar of soap that had no middle—it was shaped like a rectangular doughnut. The packaging briefly mentioned that the unique shape was good for the environment and that the creation of it required 40 percent fewer resources than a regular bar of soap. It instantly broke into several pieces the first time I tried washing my hands, because a doughnut has less structural integrity than a bar.
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