Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (6 page)

T
he night I met my husband, I was one step away from buying a T-shirt that read, “Marry Me—Fly Free.”

I thought we flight attendants needed to advertise this benefit of our job. I wanted to wear that shirt to a big party with sixty or so flight attendants and then invite a bunch of single guys. We’d meet and mingle, and maybe Mr. Right would be there. In an odd twist of fate, that is sort of how I
met my husband. Except I wasn’t wearing the T-shirt, and I wasn’t the one who arranged the party.

Just before I met Tom, my entire family had turned against me for trusting God to bring me Mr. Right. “You’re wasting the best years of your life,” my grandmother had said. “You can’t trust God for things like this!”

But I’d read a verse that essentially said if I trusted in God with all my heart, he would direct my paths.

I told that to my grandmother, and she said, “He’s directing you down the path of loneliness. Do you want that? You’re going to end up a shriveled old woman with no one to love you. Do you want that?”

I didn’t want that, but neither did I want to become a casualty in the epidemic of divorces in my family. “I just have this idea,” I said to my grandmother, “that if I leave the choice to God, he will direct me to Mr. Right. It’s called trusting in the Lord.”

“It’s called blind faith, and there’s a reason they call it that,” she told me. “It’s for people who are too blind to see the way.”

“Grandma, it’s better to be lonely single than lonely married.”

“Rubbish,” she said. “Now get out there and get yourself a husband.”

When I met Tom
I had almost given up on waiting for God to bring me someone. I was thirty-three years old and felt 103. I was working for my second airline, West Coast Airlines. (When I was a little girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we used to watch commercials that said, “West Coast Airlines, the Only Way to Fly.” And now here I was working for that airline.)

My fellow flight attendant trainees (all ninety-nine of them) and I were in Los Angeles to begin six weeks of training. Each airline has a unique training for its flight attendants. On our first night in town, before we started the official training, three of us talked the hotel van driver into taking us to Ralph’s grocery store in the Manhattan Beach Village Mall. We wanted to stock up on food so we could save our per diem and use it for more important things—like getting our nails done.

It was in the fresh fruit section that two of us noticed a good-looking guy across the aisle, staring at our friend Mary. He seemed to be lingering around us, listening to our conversation, and falling in love.

Finally he spoke to us. “You girls are in flight attendant training?” He said it with a reverence usually used to address a movie star or something.

“Yes, it’s our first day. We’re starting six weeks of training.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah, there are one hundred of us staying at a hotel in town, near LAX.”

“That’s cool.” He looked at Mary, and then he said to all
three of us. “Listen, you guys, I’m a sales rep to aerospace engineers who work at companies here in Los Angeles. Why don’t we get a party going? I mean, I’ll get all the guys together, and you can get all your flight attendant friends, and we can meet at the restaurant in this mall on Friday night.”

This was still in the days when flight attendants were hired, in part, because of their looks. All the flight attendants were actually told that they had to be tall and thin, have no blemishes, and have straight teeth. So I guess this engineer-sales rep felt the airlines had already done the visual screening for him. Or maybe he had heard our motto: “Marry me, fly free.”

His suggestion struck us as weird. We thought he was nuts or blowing smoke. But Mary liked him, so she gave him the number to our hotel.

The next Thursday night, the guy called our room and said, “I’ve got twenty-one guys for the party tomorrow. How many girls did you recruit?”

Mary and I had each picked up a different phone, and a third roommate was listening in. We all looked at each other and said, “Just us.”

We weren’t stupid. Three girls, twenty-one guys—we’d have our pick. Plus, if the guys turned out to be odd (enginerds instead of engineers), we wouldn’t be responsible for telling any other trainees about some boring party.

The truth was, I didn’t really want to go to that party, but
I was afraid of these L.A. types and went to keep my two girlfriends from getting involved with anyone who might be something worse than boring. Once I got there, I immediately started to hate the whole party.

In my old personnel job, we used to say that the decision to hire is made in the first four minutes. I felt the same way about looking for Husband Material. It wasn’t that I could decide if he was the one for me in four minutes, but I could certainly decide if he was someone I wanted to get to know. And I had already eliminated everyone at this party, or at least everyone I’d met.

After thirty minutes, I wanted to leave. I went looking for my girlfriends to tell them I was outta there. I was almost out the door when I saw him.

Across a crowded room, he stood talking to two other guys. He was tall and so good-looking he took my breath away. He wore a sweater over a button-down shirt. Conservative dresser—I liked that. (I was actually repelled by flash. I was drawn to men who didn’t need to impress me with their open shirts or gold chains.) This guy seemed to be a man of character. It just showed on his face. I don’t mean, character as in a
character
. I mean—as I later told his parents—he had God and country written all over him. (Tom’s parents later told me that Tom was a former Eagle Scout—as if being an Eagle Scout explained his good character.)

Tom and I were married eighteen months after we met. Soon we’ll celebrate our eighteenth wedding anniversary. I can honestly say he has been the most-appreciated gift God has ever given me. I prayed for Mr. Right and waited years, trusting a God who kept me waiting—until he sent someone who was worth the wait.

I wasn’t the only one in the relationship who got what was only dreamed to be possible. Tom said he could hardly believe he was dating a flight attendant, much less marrying one. And his parents were thrilled with the fact that their only son, who had moved from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Los Angeles, could now fly home anytime he wanted. “Marry me, fly free—on a seat-available basis” was a hit with the whole family of the man of my dreams.

T
om and I decided to wait a couple of years to have children. We wanted to enjoy life together. And we did. We began using our free-flight benefit on our honeymoon. We flew First Class to Maui for a week, then on to Oahu, which was in the middle of a rainstorm. Then we flew to the Oregon coast, which was in the middle of a heat wave.

During the first three years of our marriage, we flew to Colorado to ski, to New Mexico for dinner, and to Lincoln, Nebraska, at least three times a year to visit Tom’s family. We flew everywhere and anywhere we wanted. The airline I worked
for wasn’t doing well financially, so there were always seats available—and most of those seats were available in First Class. We lived a life of vacation luxury. I would call up friends in New York and tell them I was flying in for lunch. I would call up friends in Washington, D.C., and tell them I was flying in for a visit to the museums.

When Tom and I were too poor to afford a hotel room and we needed a little excitement in our lives, we would say, “Let’s fly to Atlanta for dinner and a movie.”

“Wow,” said my friends. “You have a special place in Atlanta to go to dinner?”

“No, we eat on the plane. In First Class, it’s a four-course dinner. Then they show a movie. We sleep on the flight home.”

“So let me get this straight,” our friends would say. “You’re not flying to Atlanta to attend dinner and a movie. You’re flying to Atlanta and having dinner and a movie on the plane?”

“Yeah. It’s great.”

We would often meet people in First Class who weren’t in our class financially. “So, what do you do?” we would ask before finding out they owned a baseball team or a line of grocery stores.

“What do you do?” they’d respond. I’d always say, “I’m a writer, almost finished with the great American novel.” Then I’d confess that I also worked for the airline.

Tom worked as an aerospace engineer for a company in
Long Beach, California, until a bigger company in Seattle recruited him. When Tom agreed to that new job, we moved to Seattle. Our free-flight benefit was an advantage during the nine months we spent trying to sell our condo in Los Angeles.

We flew back to Los Angeles to check on the condo advertising, walk on the beach, and try to recover from the shock of moving to a place where it rained every day. Eventually, we did sell that condo, and for the next ten years, I flew out of Seattle. That’s where Tom and I decided to start a family.

We have a saying in our home: “Flying free is heavenly.” And all our friends who received buddy passes every year say, “We agree.”

After more than twenty years on this job, I haven’t gotten over the fun of deciding at the last minute that I’d like to fly across the country, showing up at the airport, and doing just that—flying free.

I
n my first book,
101 Amazing Things About God
, I wrote about how we had our first child at age forty-five. What I don’t explain in that story is that I was the only one who was forty-five. My husband, Tom, was in high school. Or he looked like it.

Tom is exactly eight years and ten months younger than I am. Round that difference to nine years, multiply by good genes, and divide by a short haircut (which makes him look
like a teenager), and you have the basis for the high-school quip.

You may think I am exaggerating—as writers are wont to do—about how young my husband looks. That’s why I’ve come prepared with actual documentation of humiliations I’ve endured while married to someone who was in third grade when I started college. And further humiliations I endured as a result of getting pregnant just prior to joining AARP.

In 1995, I was forty-four. Tom looked twelve.

We had no children yet. Tom and I were both working: he as an aerospace engineer, and I was a flight attendant who had a few ideas for books. At the time I was so low in seniority that the only flights the airline allowed me to work were all-night trips from Seattle to Anchorage, Alaska, and back.

I would leave at seven in the evening and get home at eight in the morning, and then I would try to get some sleep before working the next night. However, I never did get sleep because we had a neighbor named Greeta who was ninety years old and suffering from dementia.

Greeta loved crows. Every morning she’d put into practice the feeding of the five thousand. Standing in front of waves of crows, green scarf flying in the wind, she’d throw bread and promise free healthcare to all. The crows loved it. The cawing was so loud that it drowned out the occasional test run of a 747 engine at the Boeing aircraft company close to our home.

I confess that the reason I know so many details about Greeta is that in my half-jet-lagged, half-dead state with no sleep, I’d lose perspective on what really mattered. I’d pull a chair up to the window where, looking between the slats of the plastic blinds, I’d watch and take notes. I knew that years down the road, this would be good fodder for a book, and my lost sleep would not be in vain.

Golden Greeta the Crow Feeda went on for hours. Then just as she’d give up and wave her hand at the crows and say, “You’ll never vote for me anyway,” it would be time to get ready for another all-nighter from Seattle to Anchorage.

Now there is something you should know about being a flight attendant: there is no humidity on the aircraft. The air is so dry that if you leave a piece of roast beef out for two hours, it becomes beef jerky. Unfortunately, the air has the same effect on skin.

So me and my beef-jerky face finally finished three all-nighters in a row, and my refreshed, young husband met me at the gate. Then we decided to go to shopping for some new clothes for him.

We picked a famous department store near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. I was sitting outside the men’s room when Tom came out to model new jeans. He stood in front of me and said, “How do you like these?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, honey.”

“I like them!” he said with a confidence that told me he was buying them.

Tom then went back into the dressing room and the sales clerk came over to comment. “At that age,” she said, “you can’t tell them anything.”

At that age, you can’t tell them anything
. Suddenly I got it. She was confirming my worst fear. Tom was thirty-five years old, and she thought I was his mother. I kept opening and closing my mouth and couldn’t think of a thing to say. That’s when Tom came out and said, “Let’s go.”

Then he wrapped his arm around me and gave me a big kiss. The sales clerk watched in horror as she slowly realized that we weren’t mother and son. Or maybe she just thought I was evil. I don’t know. The whole thing was so humiliating, I try not to think about it.

A year later, I was seven months pregnant and in the mall in Bellevue, Washington. There was a woman sitting next to me who apparently had never seen a pregnant grandmother-type. Sitting next to an Eagle Scout. Who had his arm around her.

She kept staring at me. But in that endorphin state that God gives those who are pregnant, I didn’t see myself as she did. I saw myself as a fresh, first-time mom (who maybe had let her roots slip, but what did it matter?). I had gained fifty pounds in the first seven months and had gone from model thin to fat and happy. I didn’t care how I looked! The only
thing that mattered was my belly, and I wanted that belly to stick out and shine.

The woman finally spoke. “Are you pregnant?” She asked the question as if she was shocked. Really shocked.

“Yes.” I said, smiling. Then I thought I’d let her off the hook in case she was wondering. “I’m an older first-time mom.”

“I’ll
say!
How old are you?”

I squinted my eyes at her, and rage filled me for a minute. “Well, my husband is thirty-six!” I said. “So I can’t be that old!”

These are the types of humiliations I experience every day.

I just thought you should know there are some downsides to being a flight attendant. There’s the beef-jerky face and the all-night flights with no rest in-between. And if these problems aren’t bad enough, they will seem worse if you marry a man who looks like he needs a note from his principal to go out with you and then you have a baby just before joining AARP.