Air encounter crossed generations

We were homeward bound.

So was the young woman seated next to me in a regional jet headed for Dayton on a Saturday evening.

Connie and I had made a brief trip to Boston for a family celebration and were on our way back to Jay County. One of our flights had been changed, which fractured our connection and sent us through Chicago instead of Philadelphia.

While we were seated side-by-side, the aisle separated us. Beside each of us sat a stranger.

“Where are you from?” asked the homeward bound young woman to my left, surprising me with her sudden sociability.

“Indiana,” I said. “A little town about halfway between Fort Wayne and Richmond, right along the Ohio border.”

She volunteered that she had family in Richmond. “So do I,” I said and noted that my wife and I had both attended Earlham.

Few other details emerged, mostly because she spoke softly and the aircraft was making plenty of noise. I gathered that she was on her way back to see family and that she’d been engaged in some sort of training with the army.

I wasn’t sure of that last bit.

The homeward bound young woman was dressed in civilian clothes: jeans and a pullover. And she struck me as incredibly young. These days, 20-year-olds often remind me of middle schoolers. I’m simply seeing them through an older prism.

Both of us nodded off a bit after that brief conversation, cat naps at the end of a long day of travel.

It was the pilot who got us talking again about half an hour later.

There was, he told us over the intercom, a severe storm situated right on top of the Dayton airport. There was lightning. There was heavy rain. And there were high winds.

While the storm was small, it was slow moving. As a result, the pilot said, we were going to have to fly around a bit before attempting a landing.

There’s something about the phrase “attempting a landing” that gets your attention.

“So,” I said, trying to occupy the time and distract us both, “what sort of training did you say you were involved in with the army?”

This time, maybe because both of us were more focused, communication was much better.

Turns out that this young woman I would have guessed to be in middle school was in the middle of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood.

And the reason she was out of uniform is that she was homeward bound on an emergency leave because of a death in her family.

“My grandfather,” she explained. He’d been failing in recent weeks, and things had gotten worse rapidly.

She’d had a phone call from her grandmother that morning letting her know that granddad had died.

“Lung cancer,” she said. “He started smoking when he was 10 and never quit.”

I nodded as thoughtfully as I could.

Then she added, “He nearly made it to 70.”

At my age — 69 and rising — that’s one of those phrases, a little like “attempting to land,” that really gets your attention.

Dead grandfather was my age.

And for some reason, I felt a need to defend him.

“Everybody smoked when he and I grew up,” I said. “I smoked. Everybody smoked.”

My first puff didn’t come at 10, but I’d say that 12 is a safe guess.

Her grandfather and I could have shared a light back in the day.

“It was different then,” I said, knowing that was completely insufficient for her, for her grandfather or for me for that matter.

Just about then, our pilot maneuvered his way through the clouds, dodged the storm front and brought us down safely.

“Look,” said my wife, pointing out the young woman’s window, “a rainbow.”

And as we looked out, there was absolutely nothing more to say.

All of us, after all, were homeward bound.