Hold your tongue SHARON McCULLY
There are two places I've learned never to strike up a conversation with a stranger: One is in a hospital room and the other is on an airplane.
There's something about the proximity to death that prompts people to want to share their most intimate secrets and regale you with stories about people and things you don't care about. But you can't escape with an intravenous pole attached to your arm or without a parachute.
If ever I have the misfortune to be lying in a hospital bed in a johnny shirt waiting for my next needle, the last thing I want to do is play one-upmanship with someone in the next bed. I want my own pain to resonate off all four walls and if there is any sympathy to be garnered, I want it coming exclusively to me. The sound of a stranger snoring in the next bed is music to my ears after hearing everything there is to know about their gall stones.
Ditto for air travel. I will pass over my peanuts, give up my armrest, even share a magazine. But after several ex- tended flights where oxygen masks dropping from above would have seemed like a pleasant diversion, I've learned to remain buried in a book from lift-off to landing. It's a lesson soon to be learned by the row of passengers who sat behind me on a recent four-hour flight. One well-meaning passenger made the fatal error of asking the woman seated next to her how old her little girl was.
For the next four hours, everyone within earshot was immersed in the bridged airline version of this woman's life and loves. We learned hat she was unable to conceive with Paul, her first husband. We learned Paul's sperm count.
She finally left Paul and began dating Gary. Then... DESTINY! She became pregnant. But Gary wasn't ready for fatherhood. He just wanted a date. (Did I mention that destiny happened on the third date?)
There is a new man in her life now, but he isn't ready for marriage. She's working on him. Her little girl has cavities and she's only four, Her sister's kids were teenagers before they got their first cavity. Some dentists fill baby teeth. But after polling everyone in her office and on row 27 of Air Canada flight 880, she decided to see if the tooth will fall out first.
She hasn't jogged as much as she used to before the baby came. That's because she used to jog with Paul. Lucky Paul. Paul could run. The rest of us were strapped to our seats 27,000 feet in the air.
Copyright © 1998 Sharon McCully/Log Cabin Chronicles/6.98 |