TERROR AT 30,000 FEET

One of my readers wrote to me the other day and told me to stick to my dating stories and not rant about NASA.

But every once in a while, I think something is more important than dating when someone decides to bomb the moon or someone dies and I have to attend the funeral. And although losing a dear family friend is tragic and heartbreaking, it forces me to take a break from the adventure and insanity of coupulation (my word.)

So I was off to Arizona for the funeral that turned out to be more of a celebration and drunkfest which my friend Carl would have wanted.

I could hear the words Carl would be saying in his southern drawl that I always loved hearing. “I’m gonna go run interference for ya’ll.”

While I was in Arizona, I decided to take a short, but overdue vacation to Sedona, a New Age mecca for seekers and girls who have dated too much.

I have always been a spiritual person, albeit a bit sacrilegious. I was raised Catholic and was taken to church in my mother’s arms. She couldn’t fault me for saying “Answer da phone, Mommy” when the altar boys kept ringing the bell, but when I was old enough to know better, I was chastised for laughing hysterically with my Dad in the pew. He stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth to stop himself and I got the you-are-going-to-hell-look from Mom. I guess that is why I had to write all of my sins down for my first confession which included three pages of gum-chewing, bad thoughts, disobeying my parents, and more stupid things that kids do.

The priest behind the sliding window heard the papers rustling and my voice shaking and finally asked, “Are you reading this?”

“Yes, because I can’t remember all the bad things I did,” I said.

He laughed too and told me to go and say ten Hail Marys and three Our Fathers. And I felt a little better, and although I left that indoctrination behind, the threat of going to hell (or worse, purgatory) always loomed in the corners of my mind.

So when I got to my gate before my flight and saw the nun sitting in the corner smiling that I-know-who-you-are smile at me, my first thought was, “Oh crap. I’m going to die.”

My second thought was that my cholesterol wasn’t going to kill me after all, but that instead I wouldn’t die clutching a bag of stale pretzels.

I took a deep breath and boarded the plane anyway and I arrived safely. False alarm, I guess.
Sedona was great. I was hoping to see a spaceship, but no cigars (or flying discs.) As I got to the gate for my return flight, I looked over and saw a priest. Now what are the odds? I was hoping that he wouldn’t see me with a very large crystal hanging around my neck. And although I rarely showed cleavage anymore, I was wearing a keyhole shirt that happened to bring a whole lot of focus to it. Great. Hell awaits me for sure.

But I had to come home. So I took another deep breath and boarded again with my Barbie-bag, carry-on and found my seat. I watched as the other fliers stuffed their oversized bags into the overhead compartments. What the hell do people put in there? I was sure that there were a few bodies up there.

So, there I was on this big plane with lots of seats and here comes the priest.

Oh please don’t sit by me, I prayed. (Yes, I still pray.)

But he did. Right smack next to me. And then another priest came and sat right next to him.
So it’s me and two priests and now I’m sure I’m going to die.

Father-whoever looks over at me and smiles. He has beautiful, liquidy blue eyes that distract me for a minute until I start my avoiding-purgatory-mantra, “He’s a priest, Robyn, he’s a priest.”

I’m not-so-nonchalantly trying to yank up my shirt so that the keyhole is up to my throat and my cleavage disappears, but it isn’t working. And even if it did, my multi-colored crystal is screaming blasphemy.

But he has an iPod and a computer and he has OCD. Seriously. His co-priest is sitting quietly as the plane takes off, but my blue-eyed high-tech buddy is making the sign of the cross after everything he does as I start to shake.

The seat belt sign goes on and the captain’s voice comes over the loudspeaker.

“Well, folks. We have some turbulence.” Big surprise, I think. Yep, we’re all gonna die. I’ll be up there with Carl soon running interference.

The stews have to be seated and they aren’t happy about it. No cocktails for me. So I start scribbling notes for my next article to take my mind off crashing.

“Are you a writer?” the blue-eyed priest asks.

“Uh, yes. How could you tell?” I responded. “And I’m a sinner.” No I really didn’t say that, but I thought it.

“You look like one,” he said, grinning. Yeah, right. “What do you write?”

So we started to chat. Priest number two never said a word the entire flight, but my new buddy talked a lot and I found out where he was from and what he did besides pray for our evil souls. And I disclosed that I write a silly column about dating and aging which, if this plane went down, I would never be doing again.

“There are no accidents, you know,” he said, and if my hands weren’t so busy yanking at the keyhole of my shirt, I would have made a few OCD signs of the cross myself. I still remembered how to do it.

It was a white-knuckle flight for sure, but we finally landed safely on the ground. Carl might have been disappointed that I wouldn’t be joining him so soon.

A few months later, I was headed to England to investigate crop circles. A very pleasant passenger sitting next to me started talking about New Age folks who thought that spaceships would come and rescue us in the last days on earth. I was silently hoping that was true. And that if we didn’t go with Jesus, we would all go to hell. But what if Jesus is manning the spaceship?

That Little Voice: You need to take out that list of sins from long ago and add two more, crystals and cleavage. You’ll never learn.