Hillbilly Elegy

friends’ thoughts drifted first to the cost
of an airplane flight.
For my part, I was overjoyed to
travel west and visit Uncle Jimmy, a man
I idolized on par with my great-uncles,
the Blanton men. Despite the early
departure, I didn’t sleep a wink on the
six-hour flight from Cincinnati to San
Francisco. Everything was just too
exciting: the way the earth shrank during
takeoff, the look of clouds from close up,
the scope and size of the sky, and the
way the mountains looked from the
stratosphere. The flight attendant took
notice, and by the time we hit Colorado,
I was making regular visits to the
cockpit (this was before 9/11), where