The airplane was about to take off. I had the seat by the window. She had the seat next to me, on the aisle. I was young, confident, fearless, friendly, and endlessly fascinated by everything. Particularly people. Particularly ones I did not know. I approached them the way a sugar addict would a Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates. Is the lumpy one a cashew cluster? Is the rectangle a Vermont fudge? This round one had better not be a cherry cordial, because I hate those.

I viewed people … strangers ... everyone in the world who occupied the Ranks of the Great Unknown in that same Whitman’s Sampler way. What was their shape? Their color? Their texture? Would they be smooth on the mind? Abrasive to the soul? Interesting but elusive? Tangy? Tart? Sassy? Smart?

The first leg of my flight began hours before at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. I changed planes in Kansas City, but shortly after I had settled in, my seat companion began to fumble ineffectually with her seatbelt. First, I showed her how to insert the tongue into the latch. Then …

“Dear me. I’m so clumsy,” she murmured. I picked up her fallen handbag. “I hate to be such a bother …” I un-snagged the band of her wristwatch from the edge of the armrest. “Oh, dear. I think I broke it ...” I snapped her tray table back in place after it developed poltergeist-like symptoms and flopped into her lap.

She was such a nice woman. A lady, really, in the old garden-party sense of the word. She sat erect, as if her body remembered her mother’s admonition to “stand up straight,” and she was nicely dressed in a tailored travel suit that was neither stylish nor out of style. Her hair was a neat cap of recently permed curls. She wore small pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, both of which had the look of treasured heirlooms.

Until the plane took off, I initiated every conversation. “Are you comfortable?” “Would you like to borrow my magazine?” “There’s a pillow in the compartment overhead.” But once we were in the clouds, she took over. She spoke confidently, smoothly, and seemingly at ease.

I had never met anybody like her before and suddenly felt that, instead of staring into a sampler box of chocolates, I was sitting beside a living, breathing Saturday Evening Post cover, painted by Norman Rockwell, from a series entitled “Life in These United States.” The subject of the painting was a white clapboard house with a nicely mowed yard and a cheerful summer garden in a small town somewhere in Kansas. There was a picket fence around the yard and a gate in the fence that open on a narrow, winding path.

I walked through the gate and up that path to the front door. The door opened, and I was invited inside.

I spent the rest of the airplane trip inside that house, comfortably ensconced in my seat companion’s old-fashioned parlor, in the company of the members of her book club: She introduce them all. There was Madge – a bit fussy, but essentially a good-hearted soul. Elayne – tediously proud of her prize-winning rhubarb pie. Dorothy – clueless about motherhood and shamelessly spoiling her boys. Vivian – beautiful, unmarried, and the best English teacher the high school had ever had. And Sylvia – an opinionated gossip.

The book they were reading that month was “The Life of the Hummingbird,” and everything I know about those intriguing creatures, I learned during the flight:

• That their average lifespan is three to four years

• That their hearts beat 1260 times per minute

• That the wings of the Ruby-throated hummingbird beat 53 times per second