"Not all that wander are lost."
J.R. R. Tolkien
“You must have a name,” I said after we had been chatting
for 45 minutes or so.
“Emma,” she replied
“Nice to meet you Emma,” I said with a smile and an extended
hand. “I’m Ted.”
It seemed like the right thing to do considering we had been
in a ‘warm water’ conversation, before the flight even got off the ground from
London Heathrow.
There are so many unknowns about life that emerge with the
unexpected quickness of a nearby lightening strike. This conversation was one
of them.
Backing up a bit…
There were a couple of ‘bumps’ on the trip to Denmark….the
legs would be Phoenix > London > Copenhagen > Aalborg, Denmark.
The flight out of Phoenix was delayed causing a missed
connection to Copenhagen… the rescheduled flight would be an hour and a half
later.
Because it was so close to the flight when the flight was
rearranged, there wasn’t really a choice of seats. Mine? 28F – the last seat (window) on the
right side of the plane…the one that resonates with every flush of the vacuum
driven toilet directly behind me!
With the small roller bag overhead and my backpack under the
seat in front of me, I consoled myself that I could manage the ‘knee touch’ to
seat in front of me for the hour and a half flight, after all I had gotten a
seat and that was progress. My backpack,
however, was a little too big to get under the seat, so I took my computer and
iPad out, slipping them under my seat.
Emma the seatmate…
It looked like I would have the row to myself, meaning with
a little shifting, I might just avoid the small pressure sore resulting from
constant touching of the seat in front of me.
Just then a woman took the aisle seat and after settling in,
noted my ‘compact seating arrangement,’ and said, “Would you like the aisle? I
wouldn’t mind switching, and I enjoy the window.”
Would I mind?! I
thought. Are you kidding?
It would give me a little more legroom, and permit getting up
without having to climb over her.
“I would love it,” I said, and with the switch was made!
The chat…
As it turned out, nobody sat in the middle seat, and as it
turned out, it was the only empty seat on the plane! This lent itself to an open conversation, AND
a little more elbowroom.
I’m not exactly sure how the exchange got started. I
probably asked whether she was leaving or returning home, and what she did for
a living
Emma was heading home to Sweden from her job as a ‘long
haul’ British Airways flight attendant.
I have come to appreciate this is not so unusual a thing for flight
attendants to do…living somewhere quite distant from their ‘home’ flight
base. It’s just a matter of ‘hitching’ a
ride to work, as it were.
Before we knew it, we slipped into an hour and a half ‘life and the universe’ conversation that was
so delightful and lively, it seemed we landed almost before we knew we had been
in the air. It was so engaging, I hardly
noticed there was anyone else on the flight, nor did I ‘hear’ that toilet once!
Context for this
event…
When I got on this flight, it was 9:00AM Tucson time and I
had been up for 28 hours or so – majority of which sitting in airplanes. By this time I was so tired, I was mostly
thinking about the final few hours it would take to at my final destination and
get to bed.
The conversation with Emma, however, was so engaging and
lively, that getting off the plane in Copenhagen, I felt completely refreshed. It was truly one of those ‘cup filling’
rather than ‘cup draining’ interactions…I’m pretty sure you know what I mean.
We wandered through customs toward the exit, said good-bye and
I headed to the luggage carousel…she out the door to the rest of her life.
Realty bites…
While basking in the afterglow of this encounter, I noticed
my backpack seemed a little lighter than it should have been.
Wait a minute, I
thought, Where is my computer and iPad?
Had they been stolen?
There was a brief moment of ‘stomach dropping’ disorientation
until I realized I had left them under my seat on the plan!
There was little doubt that by now, nobody was going to let
me back through security to try and retrieve them.
Don’t panic…take a
deep breath…think…
I went to the information booth in the airport to see if
they might help. It was by now nearly 35
minutes from the time I had gotten off the plane.
Sparing the intimate
detail…
As it turned out, the cleaners had found the computers and
were just about to take them to lost and found.
They were busy with other flights and would come as soon as they could…I
would NOT be making the scheduled flight to Aalborg.
The next and final flight was one hour later and required changing
my ticket, which by the way, needed to be done in a separate terminal. I would go there, change the flight and then
come back for my belongings. Things
would be tight for the flight.
As I was purchasing the ticket, someone tapped me on the
shoulder.
“Here are your computers,” said the woman sent to fetch my
things. “I thought it would be faster if I brought them to you.”
She had gotten the computer/iPad, tucked them under her arm
and pushed a two-wheel scooter through the terminals to get them to me.
I thanked her with gusto and kissed her on the cheek (she
turned beet red). She turned, hopped on
her scooter and pushed it away…to the rest of her life.
By the time I arrived to Aalborg I had been up for 36 hours,
but buoyed by the conversation with Emma and the wonderful kindness of the
information folks at the airport, I was surprisingly alert. In spite of the extra hour wait, Uffe greeted
me with his usual winning smile and enthusiastic shake of the hand.
When my head hit the pillow a little later in the evening, I
could not help but be grateful for all of the events of the trip. The conversation with Emma is the kind of
thing I truly cherish in the course of my life’s journey. The unbelievable kindness and desire to help
by the information staff at the Copenhagen airport helped me appreciate
Bismarck’s comment that…God takes care of children, idiots…” and apparently, in
this case, tired and long haul travelers…
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