I am a bit surprised that Miles isn’t showing up more nowadays as a name for boys. Not that it has ever been a wildly popular name. The only boy I knew named Miles was Miles Uritz, with whom I went to grammar school and whose father was a bookie working out of a cigar stand in a building on Lake Street in the Loop. But the reason I am surprised that there are few boys named Miles is that so many people these days have miles on the mind. By miles, I mean, of course, air miles, which, as every middle-class person knows, allow us to fly for nothing or upgrade our seating on plane trips.
I think about air miles a fair amount myself. A few weeks ago, for the first time, I actually used 40,000, of the nearly 60,000 I have acquired over a very long period, to travel Business class instead of Economy from Chicago to San Francisco and back for two. Owing to a minor ailment, I wasn’t able to partake of the booze, and the chicken dish going out was dry and the pork dish on the return was inedible. Still, for a total of nearly eight hours, I was, and felt myself, upgraded: “carriage folk,” as Max Beerbohm called Malcolm Muggeridge when he showed up at Beerbohm’s Rapallo home in a broken-down buggy driven by a swayback horse wearing a hat.
Yet my thinking about miles is negligible compared with that of several people I know, including members of my family, who seem to think about them almost perpetually. My son, who travels a lot on business, is a member of just about every airport and car rental club going. With his mileage and various upgrade coupons, he is rarely reduced to flying Economy — that is, with the rabble of passengers among whom is to be found his father. I have a sister-in-law so relentless at arranging mileage deals I used to say that, if you called American Airlines, you would get a phone menu that, after directing you to press One for queries about domestic flights, Two for queries about international flights, and Three for those about arrival and departure times, ended by announcing, “And if you are Marcia Epstein, please press Four, and we’ll be with you in a minute, Marcia.”
A few years ago, I read about a man who rented five cars at low prices in a single day because the bonus air mileage he received for the car rentals allowed him to end up saving money on a flight from New York to the Coast. Some people are able to add handsomely to their mileage by arranging on a flight, say, from Kansas City to Milwaukee, a brief stop and change of plane in Hong Kong or the South Pole. One of the real disadvantages of being president of the United States is that, flying exclusively on Air Force One, you get no mileage. Four — possibly eight — years without air miles! Unless this is soon changed, how can we expect to get first-rate people to run for the office?
I seem to have no aptitude for adding to my own miles. My last two trips to Europe were made on Swiss Air and KLM, neither of which added a single city block to my mileage account. I have turned down other opportunities. MCI recently sent me an invitation to betray my current long-distance phone service, for which it offered me 7,000 free miles and yet more miles each month for the calls I make. For a $ 60 fee, various credit card companies have offered to get me miles for everything I charge. Lots of people, I have discovered, pay all their bills, grocery and medical included, by credit card, thus piling up the miles.
Miles, it’s what it’s all about — it’s the name of the game. Should the economy ever crash, miles may one day become the basic unit of economic exchange. (“What a beautiful engagement ring! I understand he paid a cool quarter-of-a-million miles for it.”) Mileage cannot be passed on from generation; you cannot, in other words, leave your miles to your family, which, though cruel, has a right feeling of even-handed distributive justice about it. Otherwise some families might fly for nothing forever. Still, what death could be more untimely than that of someone who pegs out with a couple of hundred thousand or so miles in his account, leaving his poor widow for the rest of her days to fly Economy class.
Not long ago, at my father’s funeral it was suggested that, if I paid the costs — roughly $ 11,000 — with a credit card, I could get miles: 11,000 big (or, should I say long?) ones. Fortunately, I don’t have a credit card that gives me mileage. Had I the right credit card, would I have done it? Would I have been ready to fly, in effect, over my father’s dead body? Better not to think about it, especially when I, no doubt like you, have “miles to go before I sleep.”
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
