SOMETHING IS ROTTEN
I’m not in a very good mood. I think it’s this: I think it’s American Airlines that has me in a funk.
I applied for their credit card recently. It seemed like a prudent thing to do because they were being so generous. “If you apply for this in the next 3 1/2 minutes,” the air steward more or less said, “we’ll give you 50k miles — the amount needed for a two-way transatlantic trip!” Sign me up, I said, thinking about scenarios, possible crisis situations when I might have to get to Scotland quick, on a shoestring.
I had one of those this week – a scenario - but still I had plenty of time, presence of mind, to pick my way through the AA website for a phone number and then further pick my way – for more than an hour – for a “live body,” someone whose first language I do not happen to speak. I am always interested in this — the accents which, like mine here in the US, give a clue to a different provenance, a different sort of circumstance. I am always interested in where the person is in space, where their sun is. If it’s up, or halfway up Or if it’s down; if it winks off an ocean in the distance, or flashes off the side of some dystopian mirrored block.
So I usually ask. “Where are you speaking from?” That is how my father would have put it when he called me. He knew perfectly well I was in Washington, D.C. or St. Louis, Missouri, 4,000 miles to the west, but he was meaning what room, and what piece of furniture I was sitting on – sofa or chair. Yes, he knew where I was geographically, but in order to connect more intimately with me across the miles he needed my exact coordinates, and my aspect – facing the fireplace or looking past the bookcase to the window?
So I asked. I was feeling “fragile.” Like my dad, I wanted to reach across the space between, connect minusculey with another human being. “Where are you speaking from?” I said. There was a gap in her key-tapping; a gap in her monoto roboto. And then she said: “We’re no longer allowed to disclose that information.”
I was grateful for American Airlines, then. Quick as a flash, it had given me something to think about beyond my own situation. Old American Airlines, it seems, has an interesting new policy. I spent a little time wondering about it, this flagrant huggermugger. And something was telling me the woman probably wasn’t sitting at a desk in Kansas, looking forward to her summer holiday in Cancun (AA employees fly free!!). But somewhere faraway, also on a shoestring, at 2 o’clock in the morning.
I didn’t end up using my miles, which aren’t actually miles, of course. But I could have. I could have not been wearing my glasses, not seen in the nanoscopic print that the journey they were offering me (which actually, wouldn’t you know, needed 54k miles, requiring me to buy the extra 4k for $300) would have taken about five days and required not just reliably elastic arterial walls and a connecting cattle bus through dim-lit neighborhoods, but a blow-up mattress and a strong pair of lips because, btw, there isn’t any carpet at Newark, only marble, and marble is cold. It’s not what you want when you’re feeling fragile, when you have to get somewhere quick – on a heartstring.
It’s good to know, though, that once I’ve a few more trips to exotic lands under my belt, once I’m a seasoned traveler on this country’s flagship airline, I will be treated to the gentleness we all deserve. I will be up in “first class,” and before I even know it, I’ll be be preparing by bed for landing.
AB 11.6.24