Do you have something better than first class

It’s funny the little things that we don’t realize we need until we have them. It’s all part of the weight of being rich. This access to a world of extreme material comfort. The ways of ease we have at our disposal are so many. But it never seems enough.

Slowly an item, once deluxe, becomes commonplace, then a necessity. Then we begin to feel need again. It’s a vicious cycle, and it is this I speak of when I say the weight of being rich. Perhaps this weight is the reason Jesus spoke about how it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This access to more can have grave negative effects.

It’s a dilemma, this fact of living with so much. Mind you I am not complaining - just explaining - and only because it has happened again. I must tell you too, that by modern western world standards, I am a poor man. What’s even worse is when, forgetting the other 90 percent of the world population, I begin to believe it myself.

I came back from the states the other day to my home in France on the Newark to Paris Flight. Yes, already the needles eye is shrinking, but it can always get smaller. I had come in for a party in Manhattan, at the university of my deceased father. It was a big fete in his honor and it was five days of food and drink and family without end. I imbibed them all just to the point that I could no longer keep it all inside me, and the next day I left.

As I was getting on the plane, and here I tell you I am also rich in that I am neither grossly disfigured or mentally debilitated, I chatted with one of the flight attendants who evidently took a shining to me. Through a series of maneuvers she got me bumped up to first class. Being a member of the working leisure class I had often walked through this section of the plane, but had never spent any flight time in its confines.

I can tell you now it is so much better than being cramped in the back. There is a seat that folds into a bed, a full screen movie monitor in front of you, and a stewardess literally at your beck and call. You watch a movie, eat dinner, have a cocktail and go to bed. You wake up comfortably as a soft spoken attendant opens your window shade onto a new day, a hot towel at the ready, “orange juice, coffee, perhaps an espresso?” Do you have enough of everything, if not, just ask.

For the first time I walked off the plane rested and feeling good. I had always felt good just having the luxury of flying back and forth as I needed, but that was before. Now, rich man that I am, I have a new need.