The trip home was exhausting. I got to LaGuardia, just in time to find out my flight to Atlanta had been canceled. I pushed, elbowed and sacrificed all dignity and kindness I saved up in my karma bank, and got to the #2 spot in line at the re-booking desk. They got me on the next flight out, but wouldn’t move my connecting flight to a later departure – saying I would still land in Atlanta a whopping nineteen minutes before my flight to Phoenix left.
A few moments later – they announced that my new flight would be delayed by a half hour, landing me in Atlanta eleven minutes after my connection was suppose to leave. I got back into the ticketing line and explained that NOW they needed to put me on a later flight.
Instead of giving me a new ticket – they put me on a “safety flight.” I was still booked on the flight I would miss by eleven minutes, but also had a ticket for a flight leaving 2 hours after that. Fair enough.
My flight to Atlanta landed early – and I had six minutes to get from the end of B-Terminal at Atlanta Hartsfield to the other end of A-Terminal. This involved a long run, a subway ride, and another long run.
The door was closed when I ran up to the gate – but a woman manning the desk saw me running up and yelled “Phoenix?”
“Yes!” I yelled. For some reason, this kind woman got on a radio and said “we’ve got one more,” entered the code and opened the door for me so I could get home on time.
Everyone was already in their seats. Flight attendants gave me unpleasant looks – passengers were none to pleased. I sat down in my seat and, after running some outlandishly long distance with a suitcase and a camera, then coming to an abrupt stop – immediately thought I was going to faint.
Trying to… ya know… not faint… I sat forward and rest my forehead against the seat in front of me.
“Are you okay, my son?” asked the man sitting beside me.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Just out of breath,” I said, as we lifted off the ground.
After regaining my composure, the ability to breathe oxygen without seeing spots, and had stopped sweating like a mall-Santa, I opened my eyes to find that the airplane I was on had free satellite TV in every seatback, free Wifi, and free interactive games on the TVs. If the recession has done only one good thing – it has made companies desperately court our love by providing us with free things like TV and Wifi.
The man sitting next to me, who had asked if I was okay – was playing a trivia game. On the bottom of his screen, it said that 46 passengers were playing, and he was in second place with 4,000 some odd points.
He looked to be in his late 60’s, was playing by the name F-Joe, and was within a few points of taking the first place crown from the top competitor, playing under the name BALLSMOUTH.
Question 18 was about President William Howard Taft, question 19 was about Super Bowl 10. F-Joe got both of them right. BALLSMOUTH missed the one about Taft, but nailed the super bowl question.
Going into the 20th and final question, F-Joe and BALLSMOUTH were tied. F-Joe wiped his forehead, and held his right hand directly in front of the screen so he could poke the answer as soon as he read the question.
The question popped up on the screen. It said, “Which character in the hit TV Show South Park dies in every episode. (A) Eric Cartman (B) Kyle Broflovski (C) Stan Marsh or (D) Kenny McCormick.”
Without hesitation, I shot my hand out and poked D on F-Joe’s screen. He turned and looked at me and said “is that one of your favorite shows?”
“Hell yes,” I said. He laughed and watched the screen eagerly, to see if I’d actually given him the right answer.
Sure enough, I had. Both F-Joe and BALLSMOUTH had both answered the question correctly – but due to my catlike reflexes, F-Joe’s answer was clocked a half second before BALLSMOUTH’s, earned a few extra points, and F-Joe was therefore the smartest man on the plane.
He did a fist pump in the air, thanked me and said, “but, I didn’t really win. You got that last one for me.”
“Call it divine intervention,” I said, shrugging.
F-Joe let out a good, hearty laugh and said “Oh, I know all about divine intervention.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
“Oh yes. I’m a priest,” he said – pointing to his priest-collar thing.
He called me “my son,” when I was panting myself back to existence, he played by the name F-Joe… and he had on the collar. Also, I noticed in his seat pocket was a book called “Why Does God Allow Evil?”
I immediately felt uncomfortable for making the “divine intervention,” joke – and knew my life long dream of being a detective had been shattered.
“How did you know I wouldn’t get that one right?” he asked, mocking offense as he pointed to the screen.
“It was the kind of questions where you either know it immediately, or you don’t know it,” I told him.
He asked me to tell him about South Park, saying he’d heard of it but didn’t know anything about it. I told him, in the best way I could, what South Park is all about.
“But that one kid dies in every episode? How does he come back?”
“That’s not the kind of detail South Park spends too much time worrying about,” I said.
He told me he thought this was ridiculous, but said, “I’ll make a note of taking a peek if I ever see it on.”
Ffffffooooorrrreeeeeeshadowing. Satellite TV. Late night flight.
Sure enough, within a half an hour – Comedy Central was playing South Park.
I have yet to decide if I think this is a good thing or a bad thing – but the episode playing was indeed NOT “Red Hot Catholic Love.” Instead, it was “Spookyfish,” the episode from season 2 where a killer goldfish comes to South Park, and Cartman gets transported to a parallel universe. This is not only one of my favorite episodes, but one of the episodes I found appropriate enough to show my mother when she asked me to, “show her that South Park show you and your friends were laughing about last night.”
I nudged Father Joe, who had thankfully paid the $2 for headphones, and told him if he put his TV on channel 14 – he could see the elusive show that had won him the honor of smartest man in flight.
Watching a catholic priest experience South Park for the first time vividly reminded me of watching my older brother explain “The Internet” to my 94 year old grandmother. More confusion than anything, with two tablespoons of “what is this world coming to,” and just a dash of “back in my day!”
Father Joe asked what I do for a living, I told him I work in investments and gave a brief description of my job.
He chuckled and said, “you don’t LOOK much like a stock broker!”
I smiled and told him, “you probably wouldn’t look much like a catholic priest if you’d just about fainted while running through Atlanta Hartsfield to catch a flight you had 6 minutes to board.”
Father Joe thought about this for a second and said, “well – that’s why we wear these,” he said, pointing to the collar, “even in our darkest days, we’re still easy to spot.”
We had an hour left of the flight and were making small talk. Here was my opportunity to ask a catholic priest anything and not have to worry about the long term effects of seeming rude or just foolish.
Politeness overrode my desire to ask him if he had ever had sex, so instead I asked what he did on the 6 days of the week where he wasn’t preaching.
“Oh – I do more than you think. I have to write the sermons, visit the sick, perform weddings, funerals, sometimes on the same day! I eat dinner with converts, convert strangers while they eat dinner, it’s a full life… and of course, you have to find some time for yourself,” he said.
“What do you do for fun?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said quietly, “I try to be modest, but I can whoop the choirboys on that X-Box.”
