My flight with Ruth Bader Ginsburg
'Eleven years ago, I boarded the flight home to New York late on a Friday afternoon in late May with my heavy briefcase slung from my shoulder. It had been a tough day of meetings in the D.C. area as in-house counsel for a software company, and I was tired and anxious to get home.
As I approached 8C, an aisle seat which was always my preference, I saw it was occupied by a small elderly woman. I rechecked my boarding pass, confirmed she was in my seat, and paused to think what to do. The lady looked up at me and said in a voice crackling with apology, “I’m probably in your seat.”
“I’ll find another seat,” I replied. “You stay put.”
“No,” she insisted. “I’ll move.” She pushed up her paper-strewn tray table and began dragging some bags on the floor over toward the window seat. I thanked her, but felt ashamed for putting a senior citizen through that effort.
I settled in, pulled some work papers from my briefcase, and she invited me to share the unoccupied middle seat, where she had a folder and some other items.
“No, thanks,” I said, “All yours.”
I checked my emails, but also gave the woman the once over. She was really tiny, clearly well into her seventies. Her Redweld folder on the middle seat and laser focus on a legal document on her tray table told me she was a lawyer. And she was working. She was scribbling all over the pages, in pencil, and she had a system. Every few minutes she put the pencil she had been using in a plastic bag on our middle seat, which was full of blunted pencils, and grabbed a sharp pencil from another bag. She was editing something, in tiny handwriting. She was fully engaged.
As the plane lifted off, I began marking up my own work papers in pen, but exhaustion made it hard to focus. I kept lapsing into guesses about her. Certainly, she was a very serious senior lawyer. Law firms, in my experience, had rarely granted partnerships to women of her generation outside of side practices, like trusts and estates. I settled on that guess. It made sense.
As the plane leveled off, I looked over and noted the name, in Sharpie, on her Redweld, marked “Ginsburg, J.”'>>>
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-my-flight-with-ruth-bader-ginsburg-20200923-ixhgbhn26bh4tb2sqjl6gu75li-story.html?
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