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lady sprang up.
    “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”
    “Oh, that’s all right,” the old lady said. She laughed by way of apology.
    I had to laugh, too. It was as if the old lady expected to be told we were already making our descent into Honolulu. I had two cups of black coffee, the old lady had hers black, too, along with an emetic-looking great round orange pastry, which looked to me rather like one of those novelty store rubber puddles of puke practical jokers stick on the bar next to one’s drink when one repairs to the pissoir. I didn’t suggest as much to the old lady. Presently the captain was back on the intercom informing us that if we looked off to our right we could see Buffalo. Two or three people forward in the cabin, not seated at window seats, rose, slid between vacant chairs, and—I wish I were kidding—actually looked down on Buffalo.
    Later, with a change of crew in Chicago for the direct flight to Honolulu, the new captain, sounding perfectly interchangeable with the one now up on the flight deck, would be yapping all the way across the western half of America, directing our attention to the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Continental Divide, certain peaks of the Rocky Mountains, whatever, never desisting until he pointed out an island some distance off the Pacific Coast which, thank the amenities, he said would be the last land we saw until we were making our descent into Honolulu, at which time the “big island,” as it is called, of Hawaii, Molokai, beautiful Maui (where Charles Lindbergh chose to be buried), and the “pineapple island” of Lanai would come into view. Naturally San Francisco had been fogged and clouded in, and the captain had reached a kind of 1984 screwballness when he announced that though that hilly city by the bay couldn’t be seen, if we looked down we could see the clouds blanketing that metropolis resting so placidly and smugly atop the San Andreas Fault, its inhabitants waiting in blissful obliviousness for that fog-enshrouded, gourmet-favored, cable-car fairyland to come tumbling down upon their Mickey Mouse skulls. All sorts of madmen would literally jump up and look down at the clouds below which, the captain had assured us, San Francisco sat.
    In the utterly unlikely event I’d wanted to see clouds covering San Francisco, I’d have been unable to do so—as the reader shall soon see with our change of planes in Chicago, after which I’d be all but trapped in my seat. It was bad enough that in their attempt to take care of our most whimsical needs, attendants were overtrained to a near compulsion to slobber all over and drown one in vats of lachrymose smiles, now the captain had been rendered a Donald Duck tour guide director! But Buffalo at eight o’clock in the morning? I wouldn’t be chauffeur-driven around that ghetto-ridden, factory-sated, pollution-enshrouded cesspool of a city at eight in the morning in a Mercedes 600, a curtain drawn discreetly between chauffeur-guide-coolie and me, a Playboy centerfold giving me head in the back seat.
    In Chicago the old lady and I were spared the chill by one of those Brobdingnagian accordionlike hallways that snake out like tentacles of some undersea monster, are clamped to the cabin’s exit, and allow the passenger to step out and walk into the terminal through a red-carpeted enclosure. The flight was ten minutes late, but we were already into the American spoke of O’Hare, did not have to clear security again, and after inquiring and being told from what gate the 9 a.m. flight to Honolulu departed, had to walk only a short distance.
    At the boarding counter I presented both our tickets and was asked whether we wanted the smoking or nonsmoking sections. When I, in turn, asked if the flight was crowded, I was told it was running “very light.” In that case we’d take two in the smoking section on either side of the aisle from one another. Explaining the old lady had suffered a stroke and had a bad heart, I told