All That Glitters
What I learned from years observing wealth.
It wasn’t until the stoic German executive popped open the champagne and began drinking straight from the bottle that I feared we might die in the next few minutes. We were approaching Florence airport but the air-traffic controller wasn’t responding. We were lower on fuel than anyone aboard would have liked, and while some people might have respected a $40 million private jet, gravity sure wouldn’t — at least, not if we were 15,000 feet in the air when the engines cut out.
The pilot radioed another airport, but something was wrong there, too — the runway was too short, the winds too fierce. The plane veered around, aiming in yet another direction. The German executive passed the bottle around. Bottoms up. I imagined the plane impacting into a picturesque Italian hillside, killing everyone onboard in a cinematic ball of fire. Not exactly a normal way for a middle-class kid to go out.
With what might have been minutes to spare, we found salvation via a tiny airstrip more than 200 miles north of our actual destination, a Tuscan villa once owned by the Machiavelli family. As we descended, I sorted through my backpack for my notebook and my passport, and wondered once again how I’d ended up in this weird job.
