Transit trouble

If you are an adult human who would willingly get on a flight of, let's say, more than an hour without anything to occupy you, please explain to me your life because I do not get it.

I started writing this post in my head after the latest such encounter, on a 3-hour flight that ended up closer to 4. I happily tucked in to Michael Cunningham's BY NIGHTFALL (the construction of it, micro and macro, is just a beauty). The man next to me dozed for a while, then started reading over my shoulder when I switched to the New Yorker and from there to my Kindle. Later, desperately, he opened the in-flight magazine and started tracing the routes with a finger. No wonder when the doors opened he practically pole-vaulted over me to try and get out faster (which, because we were in row 24, was useless).

At least this guy in his mental meanderings, whatever they were, didn't decide that I was his source of entertainment -- as seems to happen to me more and more, particularly with men slightly older than my father who are cheerfully blind to my open book and abnormally curious about my marital status.

I'm probably preaching to the choir on this one, but I for one enjoy the enforced stillness and lack of distraction that modern flying can provide to a reader. It's less so now that many flights have WiFi, but still, not all of them do. I neither feared nor dreaded this flight, except for what delays could do to it on either end. (On that account, I was lucky.)