Something has been weighing on my conscience.

On one leg of my flight to France a month ago – Miami to Paris, I think, and I usually have good recall for such things, plus I wrote it down – I was in the front row of the cabin, where I was looking right into a wall. There was no tray-table-on-the-seat-back-in-front-of-me but rather a tray that you flipped up from within the arm rest and swung around in front of you.

During a period when I had this swing-around tray deployed, I somehow dropped my bag of nuts down into the cavity in the arm rest. I tried to retrieve them but could not. I even told the flight attendant what I had done. She also tried to insert her hand into the arm rest but it didn’t fit. She swung the tray back over and restowed it; it met only a little crunchy resistance but went far enough in to allow the arm rest cover to flip back down into place.

She shrugged and asked me cheerfully, “You want some more nuts?” And she continued her rounds.