We were tossing violently now, the mid-sized commuter buffeted and battered by a strong northerly front. Winter was starting in New York and the weather was beginning to get appropriately dressed, making our final approach a bumpy ride. “The smooth part of our flight is probably over,” the captain had dryly squawked on the overhead a few minutes before, a clear sign to the frequent flyer rewards program members aboard that it was going to be a vomit bag clutcher.

I had landed an exit row seat by myself, and for that I was grateful. The last stretch of turbulence I was on, the blonde next to me yanked in her own lap.  That itself would still have been unremarkable, if not for her putrid vegan diet. Taking these aerial lumps solo was a greater luxury than the legroom – I could quiet my own anxiety with some deep breaths, crank some We Were Promised Jetpacks and land in New York unregurgitated.

About the time of my sigh of relief, as if on some derivative sitcom writer’s cue, he started praying. The deferential, smartly dressed African-American had spent his flight across the aisle quietly reading The Economist and finishing the Times crossword puzzle. In a starched designer button down sporting immaculate handmade shoes, he looked the urbane, confident Upper East Side black man. He seemed the last you would expect to wind up in the throes of charismatic excess.

The first big drop sent him into a spiritual fury.  His fervent prayer spit of his lips like the cattle rush at a Wal-mart Black Friday sale.  Each word emphatically pronounced but near silently voiced, the full span of his enormous hands shook and begged mercy from the sky.  Rocking violently back and forth in his chair like the Orthodox grandmothers I saw in Russia, his conversation with God was like the expressways we were shakily passing over, one-way and blindingly fast.

The plane’s landing lights made a strobe effect against the light snow that was generating our turbulence, lending his charismatic ecstasy alternately a stadium rock show or cheap spookhouse aura.  Huge, practiced fingers snapped with the appropriate gestures of that trade; rigid palms supplicating upwards from clenched, shaking forearms.  His eyes were squinted at the corners in an expression so pitiful you’d think he were a tax evader in front of a federal judge.

He seemed so desperate in those moments while we were landing, making me wonder why he was praying.  I would think one who prayed so well would have his post-mortem ticket already booked, even comped from a life spent in such diligent genuflection.  Shouldn’t his light at the end of the tunnel be prepaid and expecting, leaving little need to remain on this earth?

But I could see in his eyes he was afraid to die.  As he chuckled nervously about it, he declared he “still had work on this earth to do.”  In a rare fit of tact, I kept to myself my confusion as to who was setting the hours for when we should be punching out.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes.  I wonder if there are any faithful as the plane is going down.