A fly flew into Denver at the same time I did. I spotted him flitting from headrest to headrest in the plane just after the movie started, as if he was trying to find the best vantage point to watch Herbie: Fully Loaded with compound eyes.
The truth, of course, is that there isn't one.
That bluebottle made me wonder about something. From his perspective the world might have seemed suddenly boring and sterile. Where were the breezes? Where was the delicious rotting food and the thrill of avoiding spiders? And where oh where had all the pooh gone?
Seen from the dull curve of a headrest, the flight was just a period of unexplainable tedium followed by being suddenly released into the open air and again surrounded by familiar delights and dangers.
From a larger perspective, he was living one of the most interesting and incredible fly lives ever. He'd flown higher and faster than any fly has ever dreamt of. He'd traveled an unimaginably far distance to a strange, mile-high metropolis a good chunk of the way around a planet whose size and place in the universe—and perhaps even existence—no fly had even begun to fathom.
And it all happened, unnoticed, during what he probably saw as the boring bit between the two interesting halves of his life.
The thing that fly made me wonder about was whether he was the only one on the plane that had happened to, because I suspect it's not just flies that live lives of unnoticed adventure.
Then again, maybe he thought he was lifting the whole damn plane and us monkeys were lucky to have him along.
And maybe we were.
