Each year I donate a flight to Catalina Island to the fundraising silent auction at my daughter’s school. Each year somebody buys it for a few hundred dollars. I wish I could say that each year the purchaser is delighted with the trip, but in fact hardly anyone ever actually takes it. I suppose that they bid on it in a haze of Chardonnay-induced optimism, but in the cold light of dawn they begin to imagine themselves dog-paddling in mid-channel, Reeboks full of water, children imminently orphaned, and so on, and so they keep postponing the trip until it fades from memory.
Mindful of this pattern, I described the offer for this year’s auction catalog as a flight with “aviation safety maven” P.G., or something of that sort. I figured that having meditated upon countless accidents for Aftermath, I now qualified as some kind of expert. Whoever put together the booklet, however, apparently didn’t like my wording and changed it to “aviation safety buff.” The word “buff,” which seems to me more or less interchangeable with “hobbyist,” at once distorted and trivialized my relationship with aviation safety. But then perhaps everyone is a safety buff who is not a death buff.
