"Lenny, we're boarding!"

She shouted it, so I looked. I was pre-boarding, with infant, at the San Jose Airport yesterday. She was almost jostling me. I admire an older woman commanding a place. She looks familiar, I thought, and turned back around to hand over boarding passes.

My baby son was not displeased and yet he was yelling. She grimaced at my son, rolled her eyes, and sighed theatrically. I hear you, sister, I thought with one tiny part of my brain. The rest of me thought, that's my boy, you touch him, I kill you.

It was right then, when I'd gotten around to hating Patti Smith, that I realized it was Patti Smith. She was utterly nondescript, wearing a black knit hat pulled down to the top of her glasses, jeans, black boots, jacket. Only a little flow of her gray and white hair at her shoulder marked her as female. Nothing but nothing marked her as famous. She slumped into the front row of first class.

Back in my non-front-row seat, I Googled and found out she's playing a two-night stand at the Moore Theatre tonight and tomorrow. I texted my 15-year-old a link and explanation after we sat down. "Cool," she wrote, humoring me. "Are you going to say hi?" "Nah," I wrote. "But I am pretty fucking starstruck."

I don't usually like seeing celebrities; they give me the feeling that some people get when they consider that they are alone in an uncaring and unfathomable universe. I liked seeing Patti Smith, especially because she looked so plain but made noise as she pleased. Also, she seemed to be following me, so I reveled in the absurd fun of taking her appearance personally.

After the flight, I was crossing the baggage claim in a hurry for my moving bag, and Patti Smith crashed into my shoulder. "Oh, sorry," she said, and gave my baby son a big smile and a laugh. Now she liked my boy.

She disappeared, leaving behind a team of guys including a member of her original group, Lenny Kaye of "Lenny, we're boarding!" fame. The guys were finishing piling a stack of guitars onto a Smarte Carte. I snuck over to snap a photo of the guitars. The moment after I took the picture, the guitar stack crashed to the floor. I leaned over, my baby strapped to the front of me, and picked up the guitar case that had the most colorful stickers, which happened to fall precisely at my feet. "No, no, you're already carrying enough!" Lenny Kaye said to me. I handed Lenny Kaye the guitar and walked away.

On the sidewalk outside, my family shivered and waited for the parking shuttle to arrive. It was slow. We breathed into our hands. I looked across the road and, of course, there was Patti Smith, standing alone on the other side, looking like nobody, nobody looking at her, except for me, until she vanished in an orange taxicab.

I can't make Patti Smith's Seattle shows, but you can still get tickets. It's an event really. She'll be performing her 40-year-old album Horses in its entirety. In New York in November, a reviewer called it "an explosive experience in the live setting."

This morning I bought two books of Smith's poetry at Elliott Bay Books, Auguries of Innocence and The Coral Sea, the latter of which Smith wrote as an elegy after the death of her longtime friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The book contains at least three poetic short prose pieces whose first sentences refer to visual artists: "The sea was dense as a Rothko, prosaic, unbroken." "The spiritual sea was the sea of Turner." "The first time I saw Robert he was sleeping." A torn photo-booth picture of a young Mapplethorpe appears on the cover of the book. It was Mapplethorpe who took the photograph of Smith that's on the cover of Horses. Smith also wrote the award-winning book Just Kids about their relationship. (I started it, left it, and meant to return but didn't.) I'm finding these books of poetry overcooked and weirdly highfalutin rather than concrete. What a surprise to discover that Patti Smith is a neoclassicist. "And there he surrendered—a youth spread-eagle upon a bed of roses..."

Here's a line I prefer, because it was delivered in Smith's perfectly raw voice: "Lenny, we're boarding!"