Airplanes And Ashes

It seems to me I've written something about this before, but perhaps it wasn't here (I won't go back to check). I took my first ride on an airplane before I turned one, and my parents, in moving the family across the Atlantic, made it a big flight, though given my age, not a memorable one.

Over the years, we flew across the Atlantic man times, spending over half a decade in Europe. I can't say whether it was something about me, something about my father's working for Boeing, or something else altogether, but I always loved flying. Flying meant chewing gum and ginger ale. It meant Tic Tacs and that rush of being pressed into the seats as the engines roared for takeoff. It meant the odor of stale ashes and the mint of other people's stale chewing gum stuck into the ash trays.

Yes, I loved those odd odors, too. They meant travel and adventure. They were part of the multitude of signs that we were going somewhere. We might be seeing family I barely knew or returning home to the neighborhood I knew well in England. Airplanes—we flew on more than a couple 747s—were great moving castles in the sky, countries, almost, with their own atmospheres high above in the atmospheres of real countries. It didn't matter that stale cigarette ashes produced an unpleasant odor most times: on airplanes, it blended as part of the magic.