Nonfiction by Ellen Notbohm
Even eight-year-olds dressed up for airplane trips in the 1960s. Hence my flying from Oregon to Chicago in a bright white pique dress with a black-and-white checked collar, hem and sash. From my aisle seat at the back of the plane, I could see my parents and little brother several rows ahead. I didn’t mind sitting alone. I felt worldly. The stewardess brought breakfast: eggs over easy, toast triangles soaked in margarine, a tiny cup of canned fruit cocktail. My mother fervently despised margarine and canned fruit cocktail, so I felt even more worldly gobbling them, quite literally, behind her back. The greasy damp bread and slimy grapes sliding down my throat would never have been a first choice for breakfast, but opportunities for small acts of defiance rarely came my way. That made them delicious.
However, the egg was going to be trickier. Hard-boiled or scrambled eggs, those were acceptable ways to eat a yolk, but this one ran all over the plate like yellow blood from a paper cut. Revolted, I tried to cut around it delicately, in order to pop small bites of the whites into my mouth. Even on an airplane, it felt like it would be rude to reject the meal, even if politely. No thanks. I’m not hungry.
Then, calamity. A dot of egg yolk, blinding as the sun, landed in a splotch on my white collar, spreading through the mesh fabric like an inkblot.
I must have gasped in horror, because the man seated next to me glanced over. As I scraped at the stain with my napkin, he said gently, “That will only make it worse.”
Indeed, little balls and shreds of napkin stuck to the stain, unchanged for my efforts. When my tears welled, the man spoke again. “It’s just a small stain. I’m sure it will come out. That’s such a pretty dress. It doesn’t ruin it at all.”
“My mother will be angry,” I told the nice man, which wasn’t true. My mother never angered over small mishaps. I was angry with myself, dribbling food like a two-year-old. I added, “We’re going to see my grandparents,” doubting whether he could possibly understand how rare and important this was.
“I’m sure they’ll be so happy to see you that they won’t even notice a tiny spot on your dress.”
I finally looked up at this nice man, who had magically said exactly the right thing, wiping away my despair, if not the stain. Sandy-colored brows topped his light blue eyes, and he wore a black uniform with brass buttons and white braid trim. He said he was Captain Smith, and that he had a daughter about my age.
“She calls me Cap’n Crunch,” he told me, making me giggle in spite of myself. “But we still won’t buy the cereal.” He smiled as if he knew I would understand, and I nodded, no, my mom wouldn’t buy it either. She bought things like Kix and Cornflakes and Puffed Rice and all of sudden I was telling him why I thought Puffed Rice was ridiculous. You have to be really careful pouring the milk on or it will overflow. If it doesn’t overflow, the puffed rice just sits there on the milk, bobbing like balloons in a bathtub, until they take on enough milk to sink and turn to disgusting mush. Captain Smith laughed and said I’d described Puffed Rice perfectly, yes, it was like eating Styrofoam, and thank you, because now he would remember me and never eat it again.
At O’Hare, I introduced Captain Smith to my parents. He told them what a charming daughter they had, and wished them a pleasant time in Chicago.
Hurtling down the expressway in our rental car, my mother remarked, neither kindly or unkindly, that Captain Smith wasn’t a real captain, not in the U.S. military, and not an airline pilot. He was a captain in the Salvation Army.
The bell-ringers with the coin buckets at Christmastime? How did she know this? Something about that immaculate uniform? Then I wondered what I was supposed to do with this information. I said nothing because it made no difference to me. Captain Smith was a kind man who knew just what I needed to hear at the moment I most needed it. He was indeed my salvation. Real enough for me.
Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight, the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, and numerous short fiction and nonfiction pieces appearing in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies.
