The tangled web of cultural niceties

Every culture has rules - some implicit - about the roles of gender and age. When they collide, predicaments arise.

A few years ago when I was traveling across the Pacific Ocean on a United Airlines flight, I was thrown into the perfect storm of cultural collisions. It was nothing melodramatic, but rather, quiet and imperturbable in a Chekhovian kind of way.

As the aircraft reached a certain height, flight attendants started to serve drinks and then the meal. The one who came my way was an elderly lady. I would say she was past the age of 65, but I could be wrong.