Petulance

Exhibit A: As I was sitting in the plane waiting to push back, a KLM jetliner rolled up to the jetway right next to me. The words " Moeder Teresa" were painted on the side right beneath the pilot's window. The Northwest plane I was one had no name and that bothered me. If that's the done thing, then let's get with the program. Later in the day,  I changed airlines in Minneapolis and had time to kill so I watched Delta planes rolling past the window, each unnamed and by extension, unloved. It felt like a loss to me.

Exhibit B: Even though what turned out to be a decent Ruben sandwich was misidentified as a "hot turkey and cheese" as it was being offered to me, I tried to enjoy my lunch even in the face of its desertlessness. I did have a nice bowl of fresh fruit on the tray, but so did the guy next to me AND he had a pecan fudge brownie as well. Not that I go for desert that much, but if he had one, should not I have had one as well? Hmmm?

While the above mentioned grievances are legitimate and each alone enough to send anyone into a funky tailspin, I concede that my mood today might have been influenced by the book that I started to read: In Black and White:  the Life of  Sammy Davis, Jr.:

Imagine a little child backstage, adults towering over him, voices alternately soft and loud. Women fawning over him, patting the child on the head, asking the child, time and time again, to dance, to do a little soft-shoe number. Imagine that child, while out on the road, staring out a car window, without a mommy in sight, with a mommy thousands of miles away, or maybe, for all he knows, in the next town. Imagine that tired child, rubbing sleep from his eyes, unmoored from home, swallowed by magic and the all-time hustle known as show business. Imagine a child who must now save two grown men and a vaudeville troupe from time, from vanishing, from disappearing like some two-bit road show - from dying. Imagine that child smothered in the kind of tricky love that has money attached to each performance, and each performance attached to an adult's gratification or disappointment.

Comments

[Rix]

From that passage, it's easy to imagine an adult who is always "on," always performing, except perhaps when he is alone.

[toxiclabrat]

wow...

[Kathy]

It's a good thing you don't like chocolate, or the lack of brownie would have been more than a personal slight. It would have been true deprivation and perhaps, psychological devastation.