A vignette from my pre-pandemic travel journals:
March 12, 2018
The Woman in the Zulu Hat
I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming along the ramp behind me. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, exactly as he did before.
"Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.
The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."
"We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."
These incidents unfolded during my trip home from Atlanta last night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. It was hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.
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