Unexpected Gifts

Following up on my last prompt, “Witnesses for my Airport Character Assassination Trial,” and later that same day, I find myself not on the no-fly list as evidenced by the fact that I am settled into my $200 seat (I eventually got half that back) and trying to get the free wifi to work. I asked the amazing flight attendant, Beth, to help me. Unable to find a solution, she apologized profusely and offered me 1250 free miles or a $25 credit. I took the credit.

Tree of Hope

“If there’s anything at all you need, just press the button or holler,” she said. “Anything at all.” I never did press the button or holler down the length of the plane but I did have a question. I wondered if the slings and arrows of being a traveler in this day and age compared at all with the slings and arrows of those on the other side of the counter, so to speak, those folks who don’t make any of the rules nickel-and-diming the customer but who have to deal with the fallout. On Virgin Australia, you have to pay for sodas and pretzels, everything except water. Do the flight attendants and airport staff feel feel as helpless, demeaned, frustrated, angry and tired as passengers sometimes do?

So I got up and walked to the back of the plane, where Beth was sitting on a jump seat and checking her phone in the tiny crawl space behind the toilets and I asked asked what it was like to be her, if the culture of money and consumerism and capitalism and false promises affects her in her job

“No, not really,” she said and laughed, adding that she had only been in this job for a year.”

“So maybe ‘not yet’?” I asked.

She laughed, because she really did strike me as a nice and genuine person. “Flying is definitely harder than it was,” she admitted, but added, “I was in child social services for 20 years before so this is a piece of cake.”

Beth said she tried to always be nice but there were some people you just couldn’t get through to. And then she revealed something that really shocked me: About every four flights, on average, she and other flight attendants receive gifts from customers—$5 or $10 gift cards to Starbucks, chocolate, cookies, hand sanitizers, chapstick. During the recent six-week government shut-down, this only increased. On each of two flights, she got three gifts. “It was like we were linking arms, kind of like the nation came together,” she said. “We’re all in this together.”

Then we talked about Albuquerque. She wanted to know if there were any good restaurants near her hotel, which was downtown. I told her about Sadies and The Range, small local chains. She said she wanted to try the tram up to Sandia Peak (elevation 10,678 feet) then I remembered there were restaurants at the top and the boom. “Check to see if the tram is open, though,” I advised. “Sometimes they close it down because of the wind.”

Then I apologized for not having a gift for her and she laughed again because she really was such a lovely person. I went back to my seat and remembered another restaurant near downtown, the historic Church Cafe. I scribbled the name on a scrap of paper 📄and put it in her blue-gloved hand when she walked by collecting trash. And she thanked me for that and for warning her about the wind.

And all of this reminded me not for the first and hopefully not for the last of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Gate A4, in which she describes a sort of pop-up community which formed at the Albuquerque airport, about halting Arabic and passing out traditional Palestinian cookies and phone calls of stranger to stranger now friend to friend and I thought about the last line of that poem which increases in brilliance every time I read it:

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

On her last pass through the cabin, Beth asked me if I needed anything else, anything at all, maybe a snack? I declined because I had already received everything I wanted.

The Prompt

Write about an unexpected gift, given or received. It doesn’t have to be something material. In fact, few people at the OffCenter Arts writing group pointed to physical items. When they did it was seemingly small gifts—a letter, a card, a photograph, a “spoonful of smiles”—provided through the mail when the recipient was a guest of the state. It could be a work of art and I use the term “art” expansively. Author Lewis Hyde begins his book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, with a quote from Joseph Conrad: “The artist appeals to that part of our being . . . which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring.” For Hyde, art is a gift, not a commodity, just as talent and inspirations are gifts, just as the emotional response you may have to a work of art or a performance is a gift even if you paid for the experience. A gift, he writes, is "something we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.”

I have been pondering what gifts I can bestow upon future flight attendants. Gift cards are an obvious and I’m sure appreciated choice, but I’m wondering if a copy of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem would be an appropriate offering, perhaps made into a tiny zine to be stowed in apron pockets.