People Watching III

In a flurry of urgency, he plunges his hand into his regulation carry-on and produces a blank, lined legal pad and a black fine-point gel pen. Even as the plane parts reluctantly from the tarmac in a frenzy of jolts and jitters, his single-minded attention to his alternative canvas is impressive. His wizened hands clasping his thin pen, he scratches furiously at the pages of paper before him, pausing not even to take in the beauty that is unfolding itself before us somewhere between the thousands of miles separating Houston and San Francisco. His worn and weathered knitted sweater, seemingly the result of too many extra bits of wool collected over the years and later assembled haphazardly, is threadbare in places, yet so reminiscent of the character I believe him to be. Traveled. Well-versed. Independent. Yearning. His handwriting is illegible; I so want to rip those annoyingly loud pages from his dry and vein-y hands and spill their secrets to the rest of the cabin. It’s a script. He-said, she-said. His grey and white hair is glowing in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the tiny, grimy window; his thick glasses hide his tired eyes. He fidgets, and though he is tempted to break for peanuts and soda, he is resolute. The pages and the miles fly by, but the distances covered by his words are perhaps destined to travel forever. Immortality is granted to the soldiers of language, the shapers of words, and the sweater-wearing poets in the window seats of airplanes.