SEATMATE

My seatmate is a woman from Clontarf. She lives in North Carolina. She is a talker. I have already learned her whole life story, starting with her father and how she came to America.
She is traveling on her Irish passport because her US passport has expired. When she returns she plans to enter the US as a tourist.
She is a US citizen because her father was born in the US. Her grandmother died giving birth to the second child. Her relatives persuaded her grandfather to send her then two-year-old father back to Ireland so that it would be easier for him to remarry. A maiden aunt brought him back to Ireland and raised him as her own child.
She is married to an American, her second husband. She mentioned that her first husband was “departed” but her sarcastic tone suggested divorce rather than decease.

Her second husband is a professor of something or other. She spent a year in Paris while he was teaching at the Sorbonne. Her daughter attended a school for foreigners where they used SDAIE techniques (SDAIF?). When they came back to the States, he had a gig at Stanford. The child was duly enrolled in the local Palo Alto school but they had to get her remedial tutoring because the standard was so low compared to Chapel Hill schools. Really????

Fortunately, she slept for most of the flight. In the morning, she shared her addiction to Irish sausages as we ate our breakfast. I never learned her name and she wasn’t the least bit interested in my life.