Care Factor

The woman next to me on this flight is, firstly, elderly. My guess is that she’s had six or seven kids, maybe nine even, and looks ten years older than she is.

Mottled skin. Dark red patches everywhere. Short grey bowling club hair, intermittently interspersed with brown. White pants. A curtain fabric blouse, home made.

She’s quite over-weight. Incursions left and right into the air space of innocent others. Me, being one. 

Her many rings are going with her to the grave. They are half lost in flesh.  

There’s also a horizontal stomach projection that prevents her tray table from doing what it should.

Working class, she is, in the old fashioned sense. When that term described what it was, had genuine meaning.

Conniptions. She’s out of her comfort zone. She can’t get her tray down properly. She’s pinned in by unknown assailants that are busily looking the other way. The free food’s coming and she isn’t ready.

Her solution? Keep trying with the tray, getting agitated, short and sharp movements in all directions. No help is coming love; we, me and the unknown hipster, aren’t here, not really. We’ve flown the coop. Care factor none.

The empath is learning. Slowly but well, as is my wont.