Flying hime from Reno a week ago involved a three hour flight to Dallas/Ft Worth.  Upon boarding the plane, and finding my seat just one row from the back, a noise came behind me from the last row and the people I had overlooked.  It was the shrill yell of a small child, seated against the window as I was.

Its nothing, I thought.  They just need to settle in.  Besides, it wasn’t like I was the only one that could hear it.  I figured nearly the whole damn plane could.

On takeoff the roar of the engine muffled the yells a bit.  The turbulence after, muffled it further.  The plane felt like it was dropping hundreds of feet at a time.  The first few I rode out without reacting, eventually I pushed my hand ahead and clutched the side of the seat in front of me.

At any moment I expected that shrill scream to give way to cries of terror.  It did not.  It just kept marching on, enthralled with its own sound.  It continued to do so over the next three hours, the first ten of which were spent afraid that I might die.  The next two hours and fifty minutes left me regretting that I had not.

I resigned to watch a documentary close captioned on my phone, and as the shrieks continued, I followed more and more intently the tiny words on my screen.  At one point a stewardess intervene and attempted what his mother hadn’t and offered him a popsicle to quiet down.  It did not work.

An hour in and his older sister started flipping the latch of her seat belt.  It only took a minute of that coupled with the shrieking to cause a woman a few rows up to loose her shit.

“Would whoever is clicking that seat belt please quit it?” exclaimed the woman, in a voice about to break.

The clicking stopped.  Her younger brother went on.  The beverage cart had gotten close enough that in between shrieks I could hear what the folks ahead of me were ordering.  If there was ever a time when a beer was worth ten dollars, I thought, this is it.

I ordered a diet coke anyway.  On my screen i kept progressing through the lives of the boxers, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvin Hagler, and Roberto Duran.

Maybe he has a disability I reasoned.  Maybe they are just too young, still I couldn’t help but wonder how for two hours his mother didn’t try.

When we finally made the gate a mother with two young children of her own, neither of which had made a peep, moved back a row to sit directly across from the mother and two kids behind me.

“Hi,” she said, “What are your guys’ names?”

It was their mother that finally spoke.  “You can have them if you want them.  I’m done with them.  I tried to get my tubes tied after the first one, but they wouldn’t let me.”

At that I turned, finding two kids older than I imagined, with seemingly nothing wrong but their mother, whose eyes lay deep in a moist haze and the filthy white skin of her face.

“Do you want them?” she asked, turning her dead gaze to me speaking in a way that made it difficult to tell if she were joking.

All I wanted was the shrieks of her son to make her ears bleed and stop the words I heard from coming out.  For the first time in three hours he was silent.

I let them exit the plane ahead of me, so I might finally create some space between myself and them.  Getting my bag, a young black stewardess spoke to me.  “Thank you,” she said.  “I’m so sorry.”  Before I could say anything, she turned to her coworker, “Did you hear that?” with a look of pure astonishment and shock.  She mouthed the word ‘unbelievable’ as I walked away.

Just two weeks before, I was sitting with my mother in an ER room watching my father battle a sepsis infection.  His heart had been racing and now they were struggling to keep his blood pressure up.  He was awake for the first time in awhile.

A nurse came in and seemed secretly alarmed my father’s blood pressure had dropped even further.  She tried to nonchalantly move his blood pressure band over to the other arm.  I waited for it to reappear on the monitor.  It read the same.  She removed it and read it by hand.

“Any different?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.  Then for the third time in 20 minutes she asked, “Richard, can you tell me where you are right now?”

“In bed,” he cooly replied.

It broke the tension and the nurse’s shoulders convulsed in laughter. “You got me there.  Where is this bed at?”

“Same place it was five minutes ago, Mercy Hospital, downtown Des Moines.”

“Who’s the President?” she asked.

“We don’t have one,” he said.

“Sounds like he’s fine,” said my mother.  The nurse laughed again.

“We need to get your blood pressure up,” she told him.

When she left, from the seat of a hard plastic chair I told my father, “I’m sorry you are going through all this.”

“It’s all right.  I’ve lived a good life.  I’m old.  Things wear out.”

Some things sooner than others I think.

The day after I returned, we got my father back home. The infection behind him.