When serendipity isn't big enough
So I’m sitting at the gate when the pilot gets on the loud speaker and shares that the cockpit door has been accidentally locked and no one can get in. “Hasn’t happened in 30 years,” he says, dumbfounded and amused.
The crowd sitting at the gate, however, is not amused. The gate agents wheel out some water bottles and snacks and people descend on the cart like vultures. The woman next to me gives her husband a FaceTime call and tells him that the flight is delayed indefinitely. I can’t help but overhear her toddler son crying at the news. My heart breaks.
When she gets off the phone I say, “So sorry about the delay. I’m a mom, too.”
“It’s my first trip away from my kids,” she says, her eyes filling up with tears. She has an 18-month old and a 3-year-old.
“It’s so hard. I’m so sorry. I am always so anxious to get home at then end of trip,” I explain.
My pattern: fight asking the Lyft driver to turn around on the way to the airport. Slide into seat on the airplane and pull out a book. Realize it is basically a spa vacation — no one needing their hair detangled or their apple cut into slices. Enjoy compartmentalizing and feeling very good at my job (unlike much of parenting). On the return home, turn back into an anxious mess because I finally let my body feel how much I miss the smell of my kids’ heads and their finicky requests.
We sit there, scrolling and fretting, for a few more minutes, and then I decide to head around the corner to the bar and get a beer. Here is a spiritual test: can I admit I have no control, and instead of glaring at the gate agents for the next hour (alas, they also have no control, duh), use the weird pocket of time outside of time to get shit done or do something I enjoy?
I do it! I enjoy an IPA! I return emails that were written to me, oh, six months or even a year before. No shame. I dash around the corner to check and see if there’s been an announcement and see my momma friend, still fretting. “Any news?” I ask.
“No news,” she says.
“Damn. Well, I’m around the corner drinking a beer and I’d love to buy you a drink if you’d like one,” I tell her.
She smiles gratefully but declines. I get it.
I go back to my IPA and my email excavation and about ten minutes later, she appears at my side with a big smile on her face. “Still up for that beer?”
I get her a Blue Moon and splurge on an order of fries. I close my laptop and we start chatting. This is not normal for me. I like conversation, of course, but when I’m in the airport, I’m usually obsessed with efficiency and keep to myself. I feel as if I’m sort of abandoning ship on my usual self and it feels surprisingly great. Then things gets weird…
I ask her if she lives near her family and she explains that, no, she now lives in the Bay Area and grew up in Colorado.
“I live in the Bay Area. I grew up in Colorado, too,” I say. “What part?”
“Colorado Springs.”
“Me too. What high school?”
“Palmer High School.”
“Me too!”
We are dumbstruck. I very rarely meet people from my hometown outside of Colorado. I can count on one hand the amount of times that has happened in the 20 years since I’ve been gone. And here I am, in an airport bar, laughing and connecting and munching on fries with a woman who is a perfect stranger, and yet shares more of my origins and struggles than almost anyone else I know.
Text alerts pop up on both of our cell phones. The cockpit door has been magically opened. The flight is taking off. “This is so weird,” I say. “Not trying to be woo woo about it all, but how do you explain all of this?”
“I know. This is one of those moments when serendipity doesn’t seem like a big enough word.”
Exactly.
We chug our beers, board the flight side by side, and then I nestle into my seat and pull out my book. I feel giddy with the universe’s reward. I refused to turn on the strangers around me in a moment of distress, and the strangers around me turned out to be, well, not strangers at all.
Which is all to say, next time you’re pissed at the universe, consider forgiving her and befriending the person next to you. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it works so well it will kind of freak you out.
(Bonus track: Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “A-4”. I was at C-19.)