FREQUENT FLYER

#5/27. Still on-schedule after 5 mornings of belting out a 1-page story for a non-existent newspaper. I'd hoped to do one each day for a year...but only got to 27 days! (Anyway, always liked this one)

FREQUENT FLYER

If each of the many frequent flyer programs offered by most major airlines had compared their certificates given out to a Mr. Frank in the last four months, drawn a line from San Francisco to each city where he traveled, the design would have looked like a starburst. He had taken a plane ride almost every day, in almost every direction.

His routine was locked down tight. Every morning since he was told by his doctor that he had only a couple of months to live, he had driven his car to the Hotel Durant Airport Shuttle in Berkeley. In an hour he arrived at San Francisco International Airport. He usually got there between 7:30 and 8:00AM. Every day he got off at a different airline, sometimes Southwest Airlines, next time US Air, or TWA, or Lufthansa. He didn't care. He just wanted to see the world before he died.

No other person knew about his trips. His wife didn't know and neither did his best friends. After he'd heard the terrible news about his imminent death it had been as if something had snapped inside of him. He even believed that he had heard the sound of a very small twig break somewhere deep inside his stomach. From that day on he took his flights to places far and away. Juaraz, Mexico, looked great from the air, sort of like San Fernando Valley near L.A., except that instead of seeing pavement between each little house, all he saw from the air was the streaks of dirt roads. Salt Lake City was pretty neat, jagged mountains, then the white washes of salt deposits covering the edges of the dried up lake. Criss cross he went, over cornfields, over mountain tops, down into this city and that. Most airports were the same. But of course he was soon in the "Premiere" class of all major airlines and was almost always offered free coffee and special waiting rooms, recognized as a "million miler."

Each flight he took out the maximum amount of insurance, usually the $300,000 offered by Mutual of Omaha. And since he purchased each ticket with his American Express card, he automatically got a million dollar policy for each flight. It would have been fine with him if any one of the planes had crashed. He didn't care. He was dead meat. All he looked forward to was his wife's surprise when she became a millionaire from his crash, or found all the frequent flyer coupons in his desk drawer. That was his legacy. Not much for a lifetime of hard work.