Plane Ride on The Fourth of July

On the ways we consume words.

Hi friends.

I boarded the plane to Portland early on the 4th of July. Almost immediately my seatmate told me, unprompted, how much money he made every year. “A quarter of a million,” he said, a curious way to describe it, that “million” hovering there, aspirational, perhaps never to be reached.

He did it without going to college, he told me. “People don’t need college,” he said, which I can’t argue with; I have plenty of people in my life who never went to college who are doing just fine, better than fine. Better, in fact, than myself, financially, artistically, and more. And yet I suspected his soliloquy—I mean I really was just sitting there, not having said much at all—could have led in all kinds of directions where I might have fervently disagreed.

I turned to my phone—the way of the modern woman—and opened up my podcasts, and then he interrupted me and asked if I used Audible, and if I liked audiobooks.

I took a deep breath. Talking with strangers is hard for me sometimes, no matter where I am. And I have flight anxiety, which I can mostly manage, but I have rituals and patterns that work, and conversations were not a part of that. But he had asked about books. I can always talk about books. Dare I respond? Sure, why not.