I had stowed my ruck and my suitcase overhead, sat down in my window seat, secured my thermos of water in the seatback pocket in front of me, put on my reading glasses, and retrieved Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment to read again during the flight. I’ve read Dostoyevsky consistently since I first discovered his works as an undergraduate. Once I read Crime & Punishment as an eighteen-year-old boy, I was hooked for life. I devoured his other works then, as now. Dostoyevsky repays a lifetime of rereading.

I had begun to think I was going to have the little row to myself on this flight, and I again was captured by the tale of Raskolnikov, until a heavy man with a grizzled beard lumbered into the aisle and all but collapsed into the aisle seat. The whole row shook, but he seemed unaware of it. He reminded me of a character from a movie. He exhaled heavily–Ssssshhhhheeeewwwww!!!–every few breaths as if from frustration. I looked briefly up from my novel in his direction. To be such a large man, he had feminine hands with long fingers that ended in long and dirty fingernails.

I returned to my book, only occasionally looking up as the final passengers boarded and the flight attendants came by to check that our seatbelts were fastened, and the flight attendants went through their script about safety, etc. And soon we were out of Atlanta and headed to Pennsylvania.

Thirty minutes into the flight, we were offered a snack. It’s a good thing the man and I were not starving. We both looked at one another and chuckled when we each received our ginger ale and some chips. When we saw the ‘bag’ of chips, we laughed simultaneously. I put the ‘bag’ of chips on top of my novel and snapped a picture just so I would have a record of the irony. Dostoyevsky’s books are heavy and thick; this ‘bag’ of chips was just enough to keep one from passing out from starvation. Then, when my aisle buddy and I opened these ‘bags’ of chips, there were sixteen ‘mini’ chips at the very bottom of the bag, hiding out in the last regions, tiny orange shingles, daring us to forage for them, all sixteen of them.

The clouds were thick for most of the flight until we were over West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Then the clouds broke and I could see the ridges of WVA and PA below.

But my grizzled buddy and I made it. We ate the thirty-two tiny orange shingles. We drank our ginger ales. He fell asleep immediately after he took his last drink of ginger ale, and I read a few more chapters of Crime & Punishment and followed Raskolnikov’s mad plans in his wrestling with philosophical ideas of humanity, our good and evil.