I was looking at this story I wrote in 2nd or 3rd grade (on a Macintosh LC) and it is cracking me up! It is classic prodigal elementary school era Matt Rutledge – full of extreme autistic specificity, short on important plotline details, obsessed with things that 9 year olds wouldn’t normally even think about.
And I used everyone’s favorite way to cheat on calligraphy – choosing the venerable typeface Zapf Chancery.
Based on the storyline, it is kind of obvious I wanted to be an adult SO BAD.

Basically, the story begins with yours truly at Philadelphia International Airport (who knows why I picked that city?) about to embark on a vacation with my mom, and we are waiting for the flight to begin boarding passengers. Right before the boarding sequence is announced, my mother decides that she needs to go to the “COKE machines”. For some dumb reason, she leaves me at the gate, and tells me that I need to board the flight if it is called on the PA system. “And no but’s!” she says. (Apparently, I doth protest too much when it comes to following obvious instructions…)

So I waited, but she never came back from the “COKE machines”. The loudspeaker then announced that “flight 604 on Trans World Airlines” was about to depart. (TWA for the acronym-shy). I mustn’t disobey mother’s instructions, so I headed towards the plane.

“That was my flight”, I thought to myself. So I “hussled” to the gate so I could get on the flight – imagine a hectic scene in a airport concourse where I’m running past many gates in a hurry just like “Home Alone” the movie, only I’m 9 years old and all by myself in the airport, and all my family is busy making cardboard cutouts of Scottie Pippen and Hakeem Olajuwon. All of this is happening while my mother is apparently fidgeting with a wrinkled dollar bill that she can’t seem to get the “COKE machine” to accept.
I hope I had a few quarters to pay for a “smarte carte”, or as I used to call them, a “smarty carty”. Or maybe we checked all of our bags at the skycap, who knows?!?

At this point in the story, I mention that we were planning on going to “Berlin, Germany” for our vacation. Mind you, I had boarded a plane, but apparently I rode on the entire fight without thinking to check the cabin to see if my mother was also on the flight. That’s like a 7 hour flight, give or take, maybe longer if you factor in prevailing winds and the likelihood that TWA probably didn’t make much money on this sad route, and used a slower Boeing 757-100 or a McDonnell Douglas MD 80 (barf!) But I digress…
When I landed, that was the moment I finally apparently became worried about the whereabouts of my mom – I searched the whole terminal to no avail! Yet, inexplicably, I must have ignored the stewardess’ announcements on the PA system, and didn’t seem to notice what language was being used on all the signage.

Spoiler alert! I ended up walking outside, and I happen to see the “Eifeel Tower” in the distance! “The whole time I thought this city was Berlin”, I said. But apparently I was in Paris, France! Hence the story being titled “LOST IN PARIS”. Never mind that you can’t see the “Eifeel Tower” from Charles de Gaulle nor can you see it from Orly!

Knowing that gay Paree was not our intended destination, I then went back into the airport (I guess skipping the security queue) and tracked down the “stewardesses” from the flight and ask them if I could have a free plane ride back to Philadelphia.

They said yes. “Gee, thanks”, I replied. Appaently, then I sat with the stewardess the entire time while on the flight back to Philadelphia. (That assumes that the plane always goes back to the same place it originated at – but that’s logic lost on a 9 year old Matt.)

And apparently I didn’t see fit to contact anyone to see if my mother was perhaps in neither Berlin, nor Paris, nor Philly? Then, when I get back to Philly, I ask the same stewardess if I could then be taken to Berlin, the original destination. “Sure,” she says in a hurry. As a kid, I was definitely used to career woman types ignoring my stupid questions, like “how much money do you make?” or what kind of car you drove, or that the capital of Honduras was Tegucigalpa. I even once asked this girl at day care’s mother, who was black, if we could bring “cookies and cream” to the evening PTA meeting sessions for a snack, with no sense of irony that I was the cream and her daughter Shameka would be the cookies.

Anyway, back to “Lost In Paris”, by Matthew Rutledge.

So I mistakenly landed in Paris, then flew back to Philly, and then asked to be taken to Berlin via Philly. Talk about a logistical clusterfuck! I guess I did not yet understand “hub and spoke” vs. “point to point” airline business models yet, LOL.

“We flew off and landed”, was all I could come up with to explain that whole series of events. When I landed in the proper city, it turns out my mom was at the gate waiting for me! That is a long time to wait, when you factor in the jet stream and the superflous flights I was embarking on with my stewardess galpal.

So my Mom was at the gate! “I was worried you might be hurt”, is all she managed to say. My response was, “Nope, I was just fine”. Then my mother says, “let’s check into our hotel and finally start our vacation!”
The end.

Then, in an act of self-inflated conclusion, I wrote “by: Matthew Rutledge”. And if you’ll notice, I drew in pencil some bookending illustrations of Berlin. There’s a hotel called “Das Hotel”, a high-rise plattenbau with a sign that says “by: Matthew Rutledge” (see above). Apparently the marquee on the ground floor says “Das Matt Burg”. Oh, and there’s even a drawing of a control tower from “Tempelhof Flugplatz” – this being one of the airports serving Berlin in the 1980’s. It’s the one that was decomissioned to make way for the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

That whole story, which I typed myself and wrote myself, has more plotline holes than a block of Swiss cheese. But my word choice, my choice of topics, and my ability to type that much text is quite an intelligent output for a 9 year old. I guess I didn’t think much about whether the story actually made any sense or not. Details, details!

Anyway, this is freaking hilarious to read, you really should read the whole thing. It is bafflingly brilliant and absolutely convoluted at the same time. No wonder I had zero friends my own age at the time, but every teacher adored me.