Tres charming

For anyone who has ever naysayed the explosion of narcissism that is blogspot, I point you in the direction of Sophie Blackall, an artist and societal chronicler who posts at missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com.

She includes this as her About Me description on said blog: "Messages in bottles, smoke signals, letters written in the sand; the modern equivalents are the funny, sad, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless, poetic posts on Missed Connections websites. Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down."

For about a year, she's been turning craigslist missed connections postings into tiny works of poignant art. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to go ice skating in Central Park. These works of art are works of life.

Then I started thinking about missed connections in my own life.

Have you ever experienced a missed connection?

The kind that would make you want to post something on craigslist?

I remember just one ... on a flight from Washington D.C. to St. Louis (the midway point on the Southwest Air itinerary). There was a fellow, a professorial cute guy with oxford shoes (a plus), square-rimmed glasses (double plus), and an argyle sweater (oh, my) who kept turning around from the front of the plane to catch my eye.

In the olden days, flights weren't always packed, and there were many unoccupied seats between us. I suppose that some day this is how I'll recount pre 9/11 stories to my grandchildren: "In my day, we didn't sit like sardines in a flying can, dearies." In fact, there were four empty rows between us, and I would have liked to have asked him to come a little closer so we could have had a nice conversation about leather shoes.

Unfortunately, I was in the midst of my second full-blown airborne panic attack, the first having been on the flight to Washington D.C. (I was airborne; the panic attack was not actually contagious). I was having an internal freak-out experience so intense that I wouldn't have been able to remember anything he said about his accoutrements anyway. Perhaps that's why he kept looking back ... the fact that I had my arms wrapped around my shoulders in a death grip. Or perhaps it was my continuous sobbing.

On that earlier flight from Jackson, MS to Washington D.C., something broke inside me. (That something is almost healed, I note.) We hit terrible, rollicking turbulence, I got violently ill while discussing "Macbeth" with seatmates, and I had a clear realization that this mode of "safe travel" wasn't 100% guaranteed. On that horrible flight, I was in the bulkhead, and Southwest Air, at that time, at least, had rows that faced each other in that part of the plane. It was a kind of flying parlor. As I gripped that seat in tears, too, the woman across from me said, "Dear, I'd love to introduce you to my neighbors. They survived that crash into the Potomac back in the 80s and can tell you all about what it means to live through an air disaster."

Oh please, I thought, please connect me with them.