Lori Jakiela
Jimmy Carter boarded the plane with the other passengers. This was 1999, the end times according to Prince, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other end-times prognosticators. I was a flight attendant who wanted to be a writer. I was a writer who wanted to spend her life as a flight attendant—rootless, only loosely connected to a world that might be ending soon.
Jimmy Carter stored his small bag in the overhead, then made his way through the cabin. He stopped at every row to shake hands. He shook hands with crying children and beaming grandparents. He shook hands with expensive-suited business-humans, who for once looked up from the work they carried like boulders and seemed almost moved.
He shook hands with the pilots, gate agents, and other flight attendants. He shook hands with me.
You can tell a lot about people from the way they behave on airplanes. The ones who hit their call lights and demand lobster and martinis, the ones who follow the safety demo like they’re studying for a chemistry exam, the ones who put their seatbacks all the way back, the ones who tattle on the ones who put their seatbacks all the way back, the ones who kick and knee the seatbacks that are just a little bit back, the ones who go on rants that show up on YouTube, the ones who record said ranters being duct-taped and handcuffed as they try to bite their fellow passengers and flight crew, and so on.
“Airplanes are human test tubes,” a flight attendant friend said. “And humans are failing the test.”
I was a flight attendant for seven years, from 1994 until 2001.
On this day, in the 1999 end-times, Jimmy Carter, the former president of the United States, that sweetheart, was on a flight I was working. It was a shuttle flight, D.C. to New York, I think. No First Class, no fuss.
Jimmy Carter’s handshake was sturdy but sweet. His hands were familiar—not the soft hands of privilege I expected from a leader of the free world and not the hands of my father or the other Pittsburgh working-class men I knew growing up, but not distant either.
“Honest hands,” my grandmother called hands that carried a callous or two, hands that have done some work and therefore carried their own maps of what it means to be human and vulnerable in this world.
I was a child when Jimmy Carter was president. What I remember most is that my father, who voted for Richard Nixon, voted for him. My mother, who didn’t vote, said that if she did vote, she’d have voted for Jimmy Carter because he seemed nice and his wife was fashionable and pretty.
“I like her hair,” my mother, who loved Jackie Kennedy and her sweet suits, said about Rosalynn’s up-do.
People who didn’t vote for Jimmy Carter called him “the peanut farmer.” I didn’t understand why that would be a bad thing. His brother Billy was funny and brewed beer. His wife Rosalyn had some problems, but she and Jimmy loved each other in ways my parents never did. It was 1979. There was a gas crisis. There was a hostage crisis. There was an energy crisis. Jimmy Carter put on a sweater when he asked America to put on sweaters and turn their thermostats down. Jimmy Carter, arguably the most pow- erful man in the world, was so gentle that, when attacked while jogging by a rabbit, the prey of this world, he didn’t fight back.
The Washington Post made jokes about it.
What Jimmy Carter wanted most was peace when it seemed everything around him was burning. What Jimmy Carter offered was honesty in a world built on lies.
“Good men make shitty presidents,” my father, who believed the world was corrupt, said.
The older I get, the more I believe that, too.
The older I get, the more I refuse to believe that.
“Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul,” Emily Dickinson said.
“This election is a battle for the soul of America,” CNN talking head Wolf Blitzer says now in 2024, our most recent end times.
Back in the 1900s, Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
Prince survived 1999, but he died in 2016, an overdose of pain- killers. He died alone in an elevator. People made, still make, jokes about it. They quote lyrics from his hit“Let’s Go Crazy”— when the elevator tries to take you down.
Dearly beloved.
Back in the 1900s, Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. It’s worth repeating, maybe.
Ronald Reagan told a lot of jokes during his presidency. Here’s one:
“It’s true that hard work never hurt anyone, but why take a chance?”
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter first led a group of Habitat for Humanity volunteers in 1984. They built 19 homes in New York for families in need of safe, affordable housing in what became known as the Carter Work Project. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter continued building and advocating for affordable housing along- side Habitat for Humanity for almost four decades.
“You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans,” Ronald Reagan, a jellybean aficionado, said.
You can tell a lot about people from the way they behave on this earth, and around animals, and on airplanes.
Rabbits, by the way, are fierce when threatened. I know. I have a rescue rabbit. Her name is Waxy Kardashian Newman. Waxy, to honor her birth name, which honors her birthplace, Waxahachie, Texas. Kardashian because Waxy Kardashian Newman is a big rabbit, but she’s mostly all butt. I like big butts and I cannot lie, Sir Mix-A-Lot sang. This is the song I sing to Waxy Kardashian Newman when I bring her a rabbity treat shaped like a hamburger or ice cream cone, or some organic lettuce, or a chunk of high-grade hay.
Waxy Kardashian Newman is spoiled and, as all rabbits are, adorable. Still.
You should see her teeth and nails.
Back on my flight, Jimmy Carter said,“Hey there,” and “Good to see you,” like everyone was a friend. He asked, “How are you?” and waited for an answer. He looked everyone in the eye and held us in his gaze like we all mattered. He wasn’t going to stop until he’d greeted everyone on that plane.
When it was time for pushback, when we couldn’t wait anymore, the captain came on the PA and said,“We need everyone seated. Even you, Mr. President.”
Jimmy Carter blushed and waved. He apologized — to the people he didn’t get to, to the captain, to the other flight attendants and me, to his secret service agent who probably ate Tums for breakfast, such would be the worry of guarding a man so bent on being open to everyone and everything in this life.
Jimmy—never James—Carter, the great former president of the United States, a saint on this earth, said he was sorry to hold us up.
He said he didn’t want to be any trouble. He said, “Well, I guess we’ll be going now.”
Lori Jakiela has been called "the queen of the wise one-liner" by no less than Stewart O'Nan. An award-winning memoirist and poet, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Brevity, and others. This essay is excerpted from her forthcoming book All Skate: True Stories from Mid-Life and originally appeared in Belt magazine.
