Actually, Seattle's Not Such a Bad City

It was last leg of a 40-hour, Baltimore/Seattle/Baltimore business trip, and I was dog-tired when boarding a United flight from Chicago’s O’Hare, settling into 37C, the last row of seats on the plane. That suited me fine, since unlike the previous three jaunts, this plane wasn’t fully booked and I had some room to stretch, relatively speaking, in this age of vastly diminished air travel. The guy across the aisle, maybe 30, was chipper and we engaged in cursory small talk: he was astonished when I recalled that our part of the cabin was where, in the preceding century, smokers were relegated. Apparently he’d never flown when it wasn’t a crime to light a cigarette during the journey, and we both agreed it was oddly anachronistic that aircrafts still have the “no smoking” light next to the “fasten seat belts” reminder.