To the Person Sitting Next to Me - Yes, You

May 31, 20120

W. Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2007.

The invention of the laptop computer has meant that in all sorts of unlikely situations — on buses, at picnic tables, in school — we can pretend to be working.

“Why don’t you go over to your sister’s house and help her move her piano?” my mother wants to know.

“Can’t,” I grunt, showing her my laptop, angling it so the solitaire game is hidden from her view. “Working.”

I’m not going over to my sister’s to move her piano because it’s fruitless. The unfortunate fact is the furniture in her house doesn’t like her piano and objects to its presence in every room by becoming off balance and awkward, like a little boy forced to wear a tie. My sister should give up playing the piano and buy a big-screen TV — then I’d go there all the time.

Right now, I am typing this on my laptop as I sit on an airplane. More accurately, I’m in the airplane. It’s a small “commuter” aircraft, and the designers apparently felt that therefore only small people would fly in it, for the seats are as cramped as my sister’s bedroom with her piano in it.

One family has brought a baby so young the mother probably made it through security before becoming fully dilated. This just-out-of-the-oven baby may be shriveled and tiny, but his voice is fully developed. When he shrieks, the noise is so loud it scares the poor little guy to death, so he shrieks. His mother makes quiet “shhh” sounds so we’ll all think she’s in control of her infant.

As I write these words, the person sitting next to me watches raptly, not saying much (though he did snort in agreement about how loud the baby is). Now he has come alert, straightening a little, not sure he can believe his eyes.

He’s the sort of person who believes that the armrest separating us belongs only to him. Well, wait, now he’s shifted a bit, giving me some room. There, he just gave me a little more.

When he came aboard the aircraft, he was speaking into his cellphone, shouting very loudly, “I am an important man with important phone calls, so everyone should pay attention!” He shoved his carry-on bag into the overhead bin, smashing my suit coat the way a wad is tamped down into a musket barrel.

I don’t know what he had for lunch, I only know from his breath that it must have been dead for a long time, much of it spent lying in the sun by the side of a road.

He gave me a good blast of it when he turned and made several unsolicited remarks about the flight attendant’s body.

The woman to whom he referred is young, not much older than my daughter, but I resisted the temptation to toss my seatmate through the emergency exit. Instead, I said, “flight attendant?” deliberately twisted in my seat, focused on the male flight attendant in the back of the plane and agreed that while he wasn’t my type, the man did, indeed, have a wonderful rear end.

Though my seatmate seems the sort to crave being the center of attention for everything but a public hanging, he has become increasingly agitated as he reads this and has taken to staring at me in disbelief. It strikes me as being a good time to write that everyone knows he has a toupee, and that, if forced to guess, most people would speculate it is made of squirrel fur. (He’s patting his head.)

I suppose that’s rude of me to write, but then, it’s rude to sit and read other people’s computer screens, especially when you have to move your lips to do it. And for all he knows, I’m writing about some other, fictional person who found a dead squirrel by the road, ate some of it for lunch and made a wig out of the rest.

The plane is mostly empty, and without explanation, my seatmate has snapped open his safety belt and is moving to another place, glaring at me murderously. I’m too busy working to meet his eyes.

I think I’ll play some solitaire now.

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