I so seldom travel by air (and then only to visit grandson Eli in Milwaukee) that I never get used to it. Frequent flyers must do better than we did.

Frequent flyers probably get to the airport in plenty of time, which we failed to do Thursday on our way for a Halloween visit. We started out all right but burned up 30 minutes when I discovered I’d left without my phone. Then we lost more time when I chose the route where I thought we’d encounter less traffic and found the aftermath of a vehicle accident blocking us.
 But we made it. Never mind that we seethed at the security entrance while the preferreds waltzed through with arrogant impunity. Never mind that in the haste to recover from the partial disrobing and electronic and physical frisking, my belt never reappeared after passing through the scanning tunnel and left me holding up my pants with one hand, carry-on bag in the other, while we frantically ran to and fro trying to locate a mysterious Gate C10 that was not between Gate C9 and C11, where it should logically have been, as the public address system blurted out our names in a last call for boarding.

But we made it, only to find ourselves seated separately. Still holding my pants up I squeezed in beside the man sitting in the aisle seat while Rosemary took an aisle seat in the row in front of me and quickly noticed that the man occupying the window seat was speaking in a foreign language into a phone. There was nothing alarming about that, but the guy kept talking after he shut down his phone before takeoff, punctuating the air with hand gestures and jerking his head.

From the seat behind, I noticed none of it until the guy left for a bathroom trip and Rosemary told me what had been going on. Should she mention this odd behavior to a flight attendant, she wondered aloud.

She did not. The man returned to his seat after a lengthy absence. I watched the back of his head for the remainder of the trip and saw some of his unusual gesturing but nothing like his earlier performance, my wife told me later.

Afterward, we reasoned that maybe his trip into privacy had given him an opportunity to self-medicate for some condition of hyper-anxiety beyond even that we were experiencing. Whatever the reason, we were glad that we had not involved a flight attendant.

But the trip took us to a five-alarm, five-star Halloween where Eli decked out as a Ghostbuster and pretty little next-door neighbor Isabella as a police officer and they tricked and treated some more around their South Milwaukee street until they were loaded with enough candy to rot every baby tooth in their heads and still have some left over for the adult teeth that follow.

The weekend respite between the flight up and the return trip was only too brief, and soon we found ourselves facing another airport trek for which we were determined to arrive early.

And we did, just in time to hear that the flight’s departure had been delayed at least 90 minutes.