The Terrible Skies

I have a slight confession to make. I read the subject of this hilarious post on World O'Crap on the Women's Wall Street 'Terror in the Skies' piece and had my memory jogged. In the WWS story, the author reports seeing a group of non-American, non-whites giving each other meaningful glances on a plane. What's more, they had the temerity to speak with each other and generally be a group of more than two. Turns out they were musicians, although for some reason this seems to make her more nervous rather than less, as who among us has not known an Oboe player who would just as soon kill us as look at us.

But back to my memory. In October of 2003, I traveled to the quaint province of Nova Scotia via the terrifying device known as a commercial jet. Directly in front of M_ and I, were a group of seven to ten Arabic looking men who were significantly - according to the WWS author - ages between 25-50. I am sad to report that had the WWS author been on our flight, she would have been terrified too, although perhaps mollified that she could have penned her dire-warning-article earlier, and kept us all on the lookup for swarthy groups that seem vaguely menacing. At any rate, on my flight, the men all seemed to know each other. They kept looking at each other, sometimes making small facial gestures. They laughed. Some of them spoke in Arabic. I'm sure they weren't bothered at all by all the Westerners surrounding them and giving them the stink-eye, crook-eye, and evil eye.

The younger ones in the group (and how dare they congregate in groups, it's nearly as scary as a group of 14 year old girls giggling at the mall) were, how shall I say this, young. They talked more, couldn't sit still, kept getting up to talk to their pals, seemed bored. M_ and I debated who exactly this group was, for they were of too wide an age range to be an team, we thought. Honestly, we wondered in our heads if groups of Arab men only got together to be all terroristic. Unlike the aforementioned article, we did not see anyone give cold glances, carry meaningful McDonald's bags, or go to the bathroom en masse (but maybe they didn't need to pray?). When we finally landed, we saw them again in the luggage area picking up musical instrument cases. Dun dun duuuuh! Just like in the WWS article! Unlike that author, this made M_ and I say "ahhhh" and relax a bit. Afterwards, I thought perhaps it's good to be vigilant, but perhaps us randomly staring down groups on foreigners on planes is not particularly useful, and is a "warning" of nothing.

A suspicious footnote: One of the men dropped a bottle of some horrible, cheesy cologne. They may have been on a conspiracy to spread unpleasant cologne throughout Canada. I'll let you know if there are further developments.