This man, in an airplane into Denver, is reading....

I'm in the airplane, across the isle from him, in a middle seat in the 9th row. I'm between two guys, each a few years younger than me, each living within their headphones, with his arms crossed, asleep, or seemingly so, since we took off.

I'm going to the The First-Year Experience conference at the Downtown Denver Sheraton Hotel. I'm sharing Booth 804 with Judy Bernstein, author of They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan.

I'll be in Denver tonight, will post this once I'm there or tomorrow morning.

I've been reading John D'Agata's About a Mountain while my row-mates listen to their music. About Yucca Mountain, in particular. I don't know much about US nuclear waste disposal plans. I don't know that much about Los Vegas. John D'Agata is head of nonfiction writing in the Writer's Workshop, the University of Iowa.

He can write.

My plane left Newark hours ago. We landed somewhere, the crew changed, most of the passengers changed. I think we were in Charllote, [spelling], North Carolina. Ripton is in North Carolina, but he wasn't where I was.

I was in transit, in an airport. In a terminal. The terminal was a long hallway with large bathrooms and fast restaurants, a bookstore that didn't sell my book, or Judy Bernstein's or Matthew Aaron Goodman's, or any John D'Agata or James Galvin. Yesterday I finished Galvin's The Meadow.

The long hallway of the airport where I passed an hour and a half between landing and taking off again did have electric outlets. There seemed to be a lot of us plugging our many pieces of technology into those electric sockets.

On the flight from New York, I sat in the middle seat between two women. One was a bit younger, a reading teacher to young children in public school in Asbury Park, New Jersey. That's where Bruce Springsteen is from. It's a poor place. Its public school children have an overall poor reading level. She said very poor. She was reading a novel from a "New York Times bestselling author." The other woman lives in Atlanta. She was in New York for a week long training session in electric lighting. Run by Phillips. The same Phillips that makes electric bulbs. That woman was reading Nora Roberts. She let me read a couple pages. I've not read Nora Roberts.

My point is, each woman was reading. Neither plugged into ear buds or headphones or any other technology. We talked. We talked a lot and they read.

The men I'm between now, we're not talking. I don't know where they're going--other than we're landing in Denver--or why they're headed there. I don't know where they live, where their parents live now or used to before. These men put on their headphones as soon as we took off. They turned on their music. One watched a movie on his computer. One is using ear buds. The other has large Bose headphones.

I do want to know those things about them. Those sorts of things, anyways. That make conversation.

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