The Voice

As I settled into my plane seat last Monday en route back from a visit to family, two young boys came teetering down the aisle, followed by their bag-laden mother.

"Boys!" she called. "How about these seats here! Look, we can all sit together!"

She pointed to the seats directly behind me.

I sighed, as they clamored in and made themselves known with a few kicks to my chair. But their mom nipped that in the bud quickly.

"Boys!" she said. "Remember that there is a person sitting directly in front of you! Right here in this seat. Do not kick her chair!"

The kicking stopped. But then... something worse.

The mom began reading to them--from the laminated emergency procedures card.

"I hope we don't have to land in the water," she began, as if it were a bedtime story, "but in case we do there are yellow life jackets underneath all of our seats."

I tensed. As I've mentioned before, I have an uneasy relationship with air travel. That is, I fly but would prefer not to have to. It was on a plane trip, in fact, that my mom and I created what all my friends and family now know as "The Voice."

I must have been 12. My mom and I were traveling to Florida for a soccer tournament. Most of my teammates had traded seats with parents to sit next to each other and read Cosmopolitan. I sat next to mom. We played gin rummy.

I'm sure I had been nervous on previous flights, but I remember this as the first flight I really felt the weight of the I-am-in-a-hunk-of-metal-in-the-sky-with-no-control-over-how-I-get-up-or-down predicament. My mom must have seen the panic on my face because she squeezed my hand and, out of nowhere, made a noise in "The Voice."

It's impossible to describe in words, but I'll try: it's three short breaths, whispery and high-ish pitched, like something you might do as you stroked a horse. Anyway, it eventually became a tone and sound we used with each other when our regular voices couldn't convey the love we felt at a particular moment. My brother quickly adopted it too. If you've been around any combination of the three of us, you've heard "The Voice" and the noise. Most of my friends can do a fair imitation and, beautiful people that they are, accept its existence without judgment.

I have no idea what the passengers in front and back of my mom and me were thinking when they heard The Voice. Perhaps they thought my mom was calming a skittish pony who happened to be sharing her row.

I was reminded of that moment as the mom behind me read the emergency procedures to her small boys--whom I later learned were 4 and 2 years old. I peered through the crack to see them, tiny in their seats, toys and books scattered around. I tried to share their delight when their mom pointed out that we were flying through "A great big cloud!" (Actually several of them, and they were quite bumpy)

The boys were very well behaved. Still, they got antsy as we taxied to our gate after landing, taking each other's things and bickering. Then the youngest kicked off his shoe.

"Joey, if you take off your shoe again, I'm going to tell the captain to go back up into the sky," the mom threatened.

It was quiet for a moment as we all considered that possibility. Then Joey, who, like me had apparently been feigning delight as we passed through the clouds, put his shoe back on and apologized.