Bring Your Dolly to Work Day

Oh my motherfucking God.

Guess how I woke up today?

To a dead-ass motherfucking phone.

Not low battery.

Not 11% and emotionally negotiating with God.

Dead.

Black screen.

No alarm.

No messages.

No tiny rectangle telling me where to be, who needs me, what time civilization begins, or whether I have enough time to brush my teeth before launching myself toward an airport.

Nothing.

Just me and my nervous system waking up naturally, which apparently neither of us had authorized.

Perfect.

Welcome aboard.

Lucy is already missing.

By the time I got to work, I'd somehow managed to resurrect the phone, resurrect myself, locate pants, and enter the aluminum tube where hundreds of strangers agree to temporarily become a neighborhood.

And every flight develops a neighborhood.

There's always somebody's uncle.

There's always somebody who's cold.

There's somebody absolutely stunned that airplanes contain bathrooms.

There's somebody standing directly beneath the illuminated FASTEN SEATBELT SIGN asking whether they can stand up.

And today?

We had the aunties.

Not my aunties.

Not technically anyone's aunties as far as I knew.

But spiritually?

Aunties.

Two women who had apparently boarded the aircraft with one objective:

We're gonna have a nice fucking time.

Their ambassador kept periodically appearing through the galley curtain like a sitcom neighbor.

Head pops in.

"Hi."

Head disappears.

Five minutes later:

"Hi again."

Eventually the back galley had developed the unmistakable atmosphere of an extremely low-budget airport lounge.

Welcome to Galley Bell.

Population: unstable.

Dress code: compression socks.

Membership requirement: apparently knowing where the tiny bottles live.

Meanwhile, those of us working the flight were doing what flight attendants do best:

Performing highly trained safety duties while having conversations that would immediately disqualify us from running for public office.

Because then came the luggage.

You haven't experienced true workplace intimacy until you've watched several grown adults attempt to put oversized luggage into an overhead bin.

It starts innocently.

"Oh my God, that's huge."

Then:

"There's no way that's fitting."

Then somebody pushes harder.

"Oh."

Pause.

"Oh, he got it in."

And suddenly three flight attendants are standing there silently looking at each other because we are professionals.

Mature.

Safety-oriented.

Federally certified.

Absolutely nobody is going to make the joke.

Nobody.

...

"Well, apparently angle matters."

Fuck.

“Sometimes the entire planet collapses into an aft galley.”

There it is.

HR, this is satire.

Please unclench.

Then the cabin shifted.

Because that's the thing about this job.

One second you're making dick jokes about Samsonite.

The next second somebody needs you.

A parent traveling with little ones had reached that particular level of exhaustion where the human battery icon is basically blinking red.

You know the look.

The thousand-yard stare.

Hair doing whatever the fuck it wants.

One child needs something.

Then the other child needs something.

Then gravity needs something.

Then life sends one more push notification.

One of the girls I was working with clocked it instantly.

No drama.

No production.

Just that weird flight-attendant radar.

She appears with orange juice, wipes, water, whatever tiny collection of civilization can be assembled from an airplane galley.

That is one of the things people don't really understand about this job.

There are moments where nobody says:

I need help.

You just see it.

So you help.

Sometimes compassion isn't a TED Talk.

Sometimes compassion is basically:

Here, babe. Drink this fucking orange juice before you evaporate.

That's ministry.

At altitude.

And then there was cake.

Why was there cake?

I genuinely don't remember.

At a certain point you've been awake too long and the aircraft begins generating plotlines independently.

But there was cake.

There were aunties.

There were babies.

There was orange juice.

There was luggage erotica.

And somehow...

Dolly Parton entered the chat.

Because apparently Lucy had decided this was Bring Your Dolly to Work Day.

And honestly?

If Dolly Parton wants to spiritually supervise my flight, I accept.

She's qualified.

Big hair.

Big heart.

Strong opinions.

Excellent emergency lighting potential.

Approved.

Then the universe started doing that thing it does where random people begin connecting to other random people until suddenly existence feels approximately four feet wide.

Courtney Stodden comes into the conversation.

Which somehow leads back to someone I grew up knowing from Maui.

And suddenly I'm standing inside this flying metal hallway thinking:

What the fuck is happening?

Here I am.

Working somewhere over the Pacific.

Talking about Dolly Parton.

Which leads to Courtney.

Which leads to somebody from my childhood.

Which leads right back to Maui.

The place I come from.

The island has always been like that.

You can travel ten thousand miles and somehow somebody knows somebody's auntie's cousin who used to date your neighbor who went to Baldwin with somebody's mother.

Maui doesn't believe in six degrees of separation.

Maui believes in about one-and-a-half degrees and one person yelling your family name across Foodland.

At a certain point you stop demanding explanations from synchronicity.

You just notice it.

Because the world is enormous.

Until suddenly it isn't.

Sometimes the entire planet collapses into an aft galley.

Strangers become familiar.

Someone needs orange juice.

Someone knows someone from home.

Someone brought cake.

Someone is laughing behind a curtain.

And Dolly Parton is somehow spiritually involved.

Maybe that's what I love about airplanes.

They're little pressurized demonstrations of how fucking weird humanity is.

For five hours, none of us can leave.

Rich.

Poor.

Heartbroken.

Horny.

Exhausted.

Terrified.

Hungover.

New parents.

Old aunties.

People going home.

People leaving home.

People who have no idea they're about to become somebody else's story.

We're all just temporarily strapped inside the same metal confession booth.

And somewhere in the middle of it is Lucy.

Lip gloss on.

Watching.

Taking notes.

Probably stealing the cake.

People ask me sometimes where Lucy comes from.

I don't know.

Maybe she appears when life gets too absurd to explain normally.

Maybe she's the part of me that notices the ridiculous little threads connecting everything.

Maybe she's just what happens when you've spent enough years at 35,000 feet watching humanity remove its shoes.

All I know is she was absolutely working today.

Because apparently it was:

Bring Your Dolly to Work Day.

And that bitch brought the whole cast.

The aunties?

Still laughing.

The luggage?

It fit.

The parent?

Got some orange juice.

Dolly?

Spiritually present.

Lucy?

Still employed.

And me?

Still somewhere over the fucking Pacific.