Chapter 1

I'm always arriving for my plane flights too early, hours before it's even possible to check-in. I'd like to blame my parents who were always late for everything. Sometimes adolescent rebellion can be a good thing. Mom and dad will both be at least an hour late to their own funerals. Their friends call it 'Simpson Standard Time', i.e. being about an hour late for everything - I just call it bloody annoying! I haven't been an adolescent for a long time but my teenaged personal rebellion of being early instead has been long ingrained into habit.

This particular trip I was an extra hour early and for a good reason. I had tickets for the 3:30 p.m. flight to San Francisco, but I'd heard news about an especially bad storm front that was about to start pounding the west coast and I wanted to see if I could bump my flight up earlier to avoid the worst of it, which was expected later on tonight.

No dice. Everything earlier was booked up solid and then some. The ticket counters were mobbed with angry and annoyed customers all trying to change their flights and most of the airlines were now cancelling or postponing their later flights to the entire west coast. My 3:30 p.m. flight on Southwest was still scheduled on the boards, as was a later 6 p.m. flight, but everything else heading west that was later than that was now showing 'Cancelled'.

The storm was supposed to be a nasty one. Some sort of Pacific 'perfect storm' with the remnants of an unseasonably late hurricane in the Sea of Cortez moving hot tropical air inland due north and about to hit a cold Canadian air mass heading south, while a wet Pacific El Nino storm hurried eastward to catch up with them.

Uck ... this was going to be a nasty storm. Unfortunately, I really needed to be in Santa Barbara on Wednesday or else I'd have auctioned off my ticket to one of these desperate folks in a heartbeat and gone home to wait it out. My plan was to fly to San Francisco tonight, Sunday, get a car and drive down to Santa Cruz to visit my sister there on Monday and Tuesday, before driving the rest of the way down to Santa Barbara Tuesday evening. A good plan that even left me with extra available travel time in the case of an emergency ... like the worst fall storm in at least ten years, if not forty.

Lots of other travelers also had this same thought about getting out earlier today, and right before boarding was scheduled to start at 3:10 p.m. it was announced that this flight was rather badly overbooked and the flight attendants were looking for volunteers to be bumped from this flight in return for a $100 voucher for our next flight. They weren't getting many willing participants.

Oh, Hell Yes! Having been flat busted broke about 99% of my life, I've refined the fine art of pinching a nickel until it squeaks like a quarter, at the very least. Perfect storm or not, I marched right up and with my best middle eastern rug merchant poker face, offered to exchange my boarding pass for this flight in return for a guaranteed front row seat on the 6 p.m. flight ... and a $200 voucher. They agreed in a heartbeat, and handed me a boarding pass number #3 for the last flight out tonight.

The beauty of an early boarding pass number on Southwest is you get to pick your own seat. In my case, being nearly 6'4" in height, I love to grab the seats next to the emergency doors either up at the very front of the plane, or about half-way down. They are literally the only seats in the plane were I can stretch the full length of my legs out and be comfortable. Also the front reverse facing seats are usually saved for the flight attendants, and it never hurts one little bit to get the chance to be extra nice to them, for the extra drinks and peanuts if nothing else.

So, a few minutes later I watched my scheduled flight taxi away from the gate and off to the runway. Thirty seconds later, the woman of my dreams came barreling down the concourse to our gate, hoping against all odds to grow wings to make the flight that she had just missed. There was a good bit of loud squawking, but the beauty got the idea into her head rather quickly that not even an act of Congress was going to bring that plane back to the boarding gate, and emergency or not she was going to have to wait for the 6:00 p.m. flight. She took the news so well and was polite enough about her disappointment that after checking her ticket one of the gate crew gave her the next boarding pass for that flight, #4.

Mollified, the gorgeous creature sat herself down in one of the few remaining available seats — alas not next to me, and pounded away frantically on her laptop for the next two hours, oblivious to the rest of the world.

I knew that I had seen her before. Everything about her seemed familiar, as if we had been old lost friends.

I'm terrible with names, but I rarely forget a face. When I'm teaching I have to have a chart with student names and locations in front of me and by the time I've learned even half of the names the semester is usually over. Once, I was embarrassed to discover, I couldn't even remember the name of a student who had taken three different classes with me. That's pretty bad indeed.

In this case, I was certain that I knew the face ... but from where?

My best guess was that she was a former student I'd crossed paths with ... but from where? I had taught at several colleges and universities, but on a temporary non-tenure basis as a very junior professor. Barely better than being an unpaid graduate student. The problem with this theory was that she was a bit too old, appearing to be in her late 30's, or about my own age. Perhaps she was another junior professor that I had vaguely remembered from one of these colleges?

As busy as she appeared to be, it didn't look like I was going to get the chance to ask her. Even if she had the next boarding pass after mine, with nearly the entire plane to choose from, I doubted that she would pick the seat next to mine. Most normal folks hated to sit directly facing someone else on a plane, even if it was only the flight crew.

Surprisingly, when our flight was finally called for boarding a few hours later, she did indeed take the seat right next to me. I had taken the front window seat and she had immediately taken that aisle seat, kicked off her heels and stretched her legs out. I guess she had flown enough to know that these were the good seats too.

She wasn't really in the mood for conversation, but I gave it a try as our plane began to taxi off from the gate.

"This sounds contrived, but I really think I know you from somewhere. Were you ever at the University of Houston, University of Texas, University of South Carolina, University of Chicago, Rutgers or Oxford?"

"Nope. None of the above." With that her eyes and her attention went right back to her laptop computer until one of the air crew across from us gently reminded her to turn it off for take-off.

Hmmmm. Still I could have sworn I'd seen her at school. Academic conference maybe? I gave it one last try.

"Are you in academia in any way? Have I met you at a conference? Battle, Kalamazoo or Haskins?" These were the three big ones for medieval historians, the Battle Conference, held near Battle Abbey in Great Britain, the site of the famous Battle of Hastings, the University of Wisconsin-Kalamazoo conference, and the Charles Homer Haskins Society meetings in the US - first in Houston, then hosted at Cornell, now at Georgetown.

"Huh? Umm, no ... sorry." This time her lovely head disappeared into a trade magazine, something to do with either public relations or marketing. Not my sort of circle at all.

I gave it up as a lost cause and left her in peace all of the way to Phoenix, the next scheduled stop. I hadn't been very successful in my romantic life, especially in recent years and it looked like my overall feeling of malaise was still holding me weathered in, just like that storm on the west coast. This was one reason I was looking forward to this trip; a fresh start to my life in more ways than one.

While sitting on the tarmac in Phoenix virtually forever, I got a first good impression of the storm that we were about to fly into. It was pitch black outside the plane windows and the rain was beating down on us like a drum. Our stop here should have been for only about thirty minutes but we stayed parked at the gate for over an hour and half.

This is an instance where sitting next to the cabin crew paid off. They had heard that the airport here was about to close up operations for the night, until the storm had passed and that the FAA was thinking about grounding all air traffic scheduled to pass over the Rockies. Eventually someone somewhere gave us the 'go' signal and we were granted permission to take off and continue the flight at least as far as Denver, the next and last scheduled stop before San Francisco. Whomever made the decision to let us go needs to have their head examined ... we just about didn't make it there.

I'd been on very bad plane flights before. Heck, I'd flown MAC (Military Airlift Command) in my younger and more foolish days. The worst plane flight of my life was still the one when I was flying on Christmas Day on an Air Force C-130 turbo-prop plane over the South China Sea from Korea to Okinawa. We started off the flight at Osan AB with four engines and landed two hours later at Kadena AB with just one working. The crew chief didn't even blink, let alone break a sweat, when he opened up the back tail gate and started kicking out cargo pallets into the sea, not fifty feet below us to reduce weight.

"Happens all of the time — Don't worry about it!" He told us poor grunts sitting in the webbed seating down the sides. Right ... Sure thing. Not! We all kissed the ground when we landed while the air boys in blue just kind of laughed at us. Wankers...

This flight was almost as bad. We only lost one engine, but our 737 only had two to begin with, and by 'lost' I mean it completely ripped off of the wing mountings to bounce off some cactus down below in the desert somewhere. In defense of the poor schmucks that do maintenance for the airline, probably no engine bolts are strong enough to survive a sudden five thousand foot near freefall plunge followed by another abrupt hurricane force wind blast that nearly flattened us suddenly sideways. It was probably a miracle that the wing stayed on. By the time the captain got us anywhere near stabilized on a mostly level course I swear the plane had done at least two 360 degree rolls while being tossed up, down and sideways.

Needless to say, the scheduled hot coffee service was postponed indefinitely.

My pretty seatmate was scared quite out of her mind and spent most of the next hour clinging on to me for dear life. I didn't blame her; most of the other women on that flight were screaming bloody murder, including some of the men as well ... and even one or two of the cabin crew. I had seen worse, so in comparison I was a relative rock of moral support. Besides, I had at long last figured out exactly who she was and was more than delighted to have her clinging on my arm.

The final clue I needed was when the turbulence first started to get rough, shortly after takeoff in Phoenix. She had started to dig into her tote bag for something a bit more light hearted than current marketing strategies to soothe her nerves and pulled out an old High School yearbook. It was 'our' school, and from our graduation year. At last I remembered her, and I indeed knew her well, but this wasn't quite the time to compare reminiscences.

Kathy Monarché had been the golden girl of our graduating class, figuratively and literally. She was tall, athletically thin and had golden yellow hair she usually wore in a ponytail just past her shoulders. She loved the sun and the outdoors and had a deep tan that even a California surfer would have been proud of. Her family wasn't rich, but she was the absolute darling of the affluent kids' clique and she belonged to every top social club worth being in. Still, she didn't keep her nose held high like most of those girls did and she mixed well with all of the other school cliques, from the jocks to even the nerds.

I was very definitely one of the nerds. My family barely had two dimes to rub together so I didn't hang out with the rich kids, which were at least half of the population of our school. The way our school was zoned, we incorporated two of the wealthiest regions of the city, and a tiny slice of a poorer area known for being the 'artsy' district of town. At the end of the boulevard from our school was a famous country club, so it was joked with some truth that this was the only street in the world with a country club at both ends.