Aerodynamics strikes again
The only other time I’d lost my phone lasted only long enough for me to turn the car around, return to the store parking lot and fetch it from the shopping cart where I’d left it. This time was longer, and much worse.
Last week I was on a plane to visit a friend when my phone went missing. If you’ve ever been without your lifeline, you know the panic. My dread lasted probably 20 minutes, but it felt like that many hours.
It was a smaller commuter plane, narrow with two seats on each side. Settling into the aisle seat, I scuffled around getting myself situated; I switched the phone to airplane mode, stuffed it into my handbag and stowed that under the seat in front of me.
Once at cruising altitude, I felt compelled to pull out my bag, for no other reason than to assuage my anxiety. Inhaler: check. Wallet: check. Phone. Phone? Phone!!!
I dug around the handbag like a busy pocket gopher, unearthing a whole trip’s worth of necessities. Nothing. I scaled the slender depth of the seat back pocket, knowing it wouldn’t be there. I scoped the tight space around the edge of my seat and plunged my head between my knees to look under the seat. The phone was gone.
I turned to the young man sitting next to me and asked if he would look under his seat. He found nothing.
“If it fell onto the floor during takeoff,” he said, “then it probably slid toward the back of the plane.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Maybe when we come back down, it will slide back up to you,” he said, summarizing the mechanics of aerodynamics.
My phone was on this plane somewhere. I thought about the last time I was playing music in a folk circle and my pick fell into the hole of my guitar, rattling around in there and evading my efforts to shake it loose. I decided I’d wait until we landed and then ask the flight attendants to search the cabin.
We had another 30 minutes to go, and I used it to fret about what I would do if I didn’t find the phone. How would I let my friend know I’d arrived at the airport? How would I call people at home without the phone’s ease of dialing without knowing a number? My kids I could call, but my friends, no.
And the photos on there. What would I do without the one of Grace at college graduation? Or of Cooper at his new job.Why didn’t I download or print those? And would my friend and I have to spend precious time at the phone store getting me a new one?
I considered standing in the aisle and turning to the people crammed into seats behind me to ask them to please look around for an old, cracked iPhone. I craned my neck for a peek. Half the passengers were asleep and the other half looked grumpy. It would be so unlike me to have the confidence to inject myself into that.
And so I turned back around, closed my eyes and did some yoga breathing, which has been known to reduce panic if not locate lost phones. Then came a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find the tall man behind me holding my phone. As he handed it to me, I thought that must be what it feels like to be handed an Oscar statuette.
“I think it slid under your seat and under mine during takeoff,” he said.
“Aerodynamics,” I said, thanking him.