Did you ever reinvent your life story for the flier next to you on a plane, saying you were a lotto winner going to pick up the check, or maybe a brain surgeon summoned to Hollywood to save the life of a certain young starlet who was one rehab short of a cemetery?

Really, you have? That's sick! Get out of here! If memory serves, I'm fairly certain I have never whiled away the hours on a long flight by explaining to my mile-high neighbor that I was:

- The president of the airline, flying incognito in coach to see for myself whether Capt. Jones had really quit drinking before taking the wheel.

- A salesman who had woken up that morning in an ice-filled bathtub of an Atlanta hotel with a scar in my back, and now was desperately tracking down the organ harvesters because they got my one functioning kidney.

- Depressed from a long series of bad business deals and romantic entanglements and now didn't really care what happened to me -- or those around me!

- One of 20 asylum inmates being shipped to the Home for the Criminally Insane in St. Louis, but our caretaker had missed the flight.

No, you'd have to be a bad person to tell such stories to the passenger next to you at 30,000 feet. The only time I ever upset another flier, I was actually trying to make his trip more enjoyable.

I was 21 and an old hand at flights from one Navy station to another. Going home on leave from Maryland, I noticed across the aisle that the young man, maybe 16 or 17, looked worried. He told me it was his first flight.

"Nothing to worry about, kid," I said, and the clichÃs: "Why, flying is safer than driving. It's as commonplace today as cholesterol was among the cavemen. Those crashes you see on TV, why, they always happen to other people. Both Wright Brothers died in bed. Trust me, I've done this for a year now, and if I could go back, I'd have joined the Air Force instead."

The teenager calmed down and thanked me, his well-traveled elder, for the sage advice.

A few minutes later, we got sucked into the worst thunderstorm I've ever encountered -- on or off the ground. The jet's movements reminded me of a vessel that got slammed into Gilligan's isle: "The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed."

The kid was bouncing up and down in his seat and stifling his screams. When he looked my way, and I gave him a thumbs-up and mouthed: "Safe. Really safe."

If looks could kill, he would have been Jack the Ripper.

The plane landed in one piece. As I stood to squeeze into the line of departing passengers, he looked at me in disgust and mumbled something that started with, "Why, you dirty ... "

I've always wondered whether that was his last flight. Oh, well, I tried. That's more than I can say for those horrible stories you've already admitted to telling. Sick.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.