The third time my carry-on suitcase didn’t quite make it over the lip of the overhead luggage compartment and slammed down on my head, I blinked back tears. I had already been enroute 14 hours, rising at dawn on the east coast to make a flight from Dulles to LAX, where I’d waited out a seven-hour layover on a plastic chair by the gate before boarding this flight, which would be another 13 hours over the Pacific to Auckland, New Zealand. I no longer had the strength to hoist the bag over my head and was quickly losing my grip on not being a crazy person, the kind who sees no reason to put her shoes back on after clearing Security, or once, and I actually did this, hisses, “Get out of my way!” at a startled woman changing direction innocently but abruptly in front of me on a crowded concourse.
Passengers already seated watched me struggle with placid disinterest. I was getting hot and the line behind me was beginning to bulge when a handsome bald man in Ray-Bans reached around from behind me, lifted the suitcase as if it weighed nothing and deftly tucked it in the bin. “I was going to cry,” I told him, but what I meant was, “Will you marry me?”
“I could tell,” he said, and was gone.
People you meet while traveling are assigned to you by fate, like neighbors, but travel is a transient neighborhood which makes for fast alliances, quick disclosures. And unlike neighbors, those sharing your journey are willing to help not because of any chemistry, history, or potential payoff, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Like the time I flew to Bermuda because my midshipman fiancé was crewing on a Swan 44 in the Newport- Bermuda Race. Unfortunately, I landed while the fleet was still 100 miles offshore and the guesthouse where I’d be staying didn’t acknowledge my reservation. I was young. I’d paid in advance with cash at a shady travel agency in Norfolk. There were no vacancies anywhere.
The gentle guesthouse reservations clerk took pity on me. After making a call, he put me in a taxi and sent it to his “friend’s” house. The friend was a tall, inexplicably generous Bermudian who happened to hold the position of Running Back for the New York Giants. This world-class athlete owned a beautiful cliff-side home he often made available to team members. I explained my predicament as the taxi idled and he said I was welcomed to stay at his house—no need to compensate him. He’d bunk with his girlfriend in town. Looking back, I am still stunned by the magnitude of this man’s generosity. I remember being grateful, but was I grateful enough?
My fiancé’s yacht, Shadow, crossed the finish later that afternoon. We celebrated on the grassy lawn of the Royal Bermudian Yacht Club where tan yachtsmen sported shorts and knee socks, bejeweled women wore floral dresses the color of coral and the sea at noon. We spent a week in a beautiful residence where 122 wooden steps led down to a private beach.
Then there was the time I flew to Madrid in order to avoid spending my first married Christmas alone. My new husband had been deployed six weeks after we were married for the better part of a year and although the destroyer escort on which he served as Damage Control Officer was docking in Barcelona, he’d arranged to meet me in Madrid when my plane landed.
But he wasn’t there. And neither was the luggage in which I’d brought all the Christmas gifts from our families at home. In fact, the ship itself was missing. No one could tell me why the USS Pharris hadn’t docked because in reality, the ship had been delayed 72 hours by a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with a Russian sub.
I hadn’t thought to make a backup plan, but a young Spaniard, with rumpled dark hair and a winsome smile, overheard my predicament. In short order he had me on the next flight to Barcelona with him, without my luggage, yet when I arrived my suitcase was sitting there waiting. Having gone through Customs without me it had been pried open and searched. Christmas wrapping and ribbon protruded in colorful abandon from the broken locks, but to my astonishment, everything was intact. I turned around to show my Spanish friend this miracle, but he was gone.
I’ve been told the universe always offers assistance in times of change (which I interpret as times of stress), and travel certainly qualifies. These are the people with whom you have the briefest encounters but remember for the longest time.
I never saw the man in Ray-Bans, the compassionate reservations clerk, the Running Back, or the empathetic Spaniard again, and the sense that I was too young and self-absorbed to take in the magnitude of their kindness weighs on me. Surely, I thanked them; please God, let me have thanked them, instinctively, wholeheartedly, but why don’t I remember expressing my appreciation? It makes me want to do so now.
But not just to them.
The driver who let me merge, the roommate who let me borrow her car, the stylist who fixed the haircut I gave myself, the stranger who got the lug nuts off so I could fix a flat tire—there are so many people traveling together for a brief time. Who’s sitting next to you?
I remember what I received, what I felt, but not what I gave in return, and this haunts me.
So, I can only tell you, how very grateful I was and how grateful I am, now and forever.
And offer help to every lost and weary pilgrim whose path crosses mine.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
Sue grant says
Love this
Laura Oliver says
Thanks so much! Both for reading and writing.:)
Elizabeth Heron says
Laura, I want to thank YOU. In your class at St. John’s College, I sat at the big table with you and some community members and the students known as Johnnies. That was maybe in the mid 1970s. But I met you and remember you fondly. So I’m grateful for being with you now, albeit online via your Sunday writings. Really with you because you are so present in each piece. Thank you, dear Laura!
Laura Oliver says
Wow, thanks so much! (Couldn’t have been the 70’s, that’s 20-30 years before I started teaching workshops at St.John’s. Amazing how time and memory meld!) So glad you were part of that experience! And thanks for being part of it now. 🙂
Ed Smith says
For me and my favorite person in the whole world reading your musings in the Spy is one of the things that make Sundays special. Sitting here in an airport waiting for our 5 hour + late airplane, you made us smile. Thanks, but please don’t disappear on us.
Laura J Oliver says
Thanks so much, Ed. I hope by the time you read this you are airborne or have already arrived at your destination. Thanks for traveling with me on Sundays. 🙂
Wilson Dean says
The random acts of kindness you describe are what we all need to give us hope that we will prevail over the turmoil and polarization that seem to dominate our present day lives. Thank you for sharing these stories.
Laura J Oliver says
Thank you for reading them! And thank you for writing.
Nancy Prendergast says
Your essay brings me back to the year I spent hitchhiking around the British Isles with my roommate while we were penniless students in London. Such adventures, such kindness from strangers.
Since then I’ve been blessed to travel around the world a few times. It was a gift to me to hold the young Chinese tour guide’s hand as she cried about her husband who no longer wanted to sleep with her. Or the beautiful bright Japanese tour guide whose doctor husband wasn’t ready to have a baby despite the fact that they were both 40. As you wrote, “These are the people with whom you have the briefest encounters but remember for the longest time”.
Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane!
Laura J Oliver says
Yes, Nancy, I think you put your finger on it–“kindness from strangers” must be a different experience than kindness from friends. The unexpectedness must intensify the experience, seal it in memory. Thanks so much for writing!
Kathy Osvath says
I really look forward to reading your thought-provoking articles each week, Laura. You have such a gift for storytelling.
Laura J Oliver says
Thanks, Kathy! It’s both gratifying and fun to be connected in this way!
Former friend of Oxford & now SW Florida says
Southwest Florida could certainly use now and for several years to come those same Guardian Angels you had by your side… thank you!
Laura J Oliver says
Yes, legions of angels, seen and unseen. What has happened there is incomprehensible–as is any act of violence–but this time it was nature itself. Wishing you the best of all possible recoveries. Thanks for writing.
Paul Beckman says
Laura,
You get better and better.
XX
Paul
Oliver says
Paul, you are so kind. And so talented. Thanks for reading these. I am so appreciative:)
Michael Pullen says
Thank you, again, for everything you give away to all your readers. Another wonderful expression of yourself, reaching and touching an unexpressed part of that part of us we all share.
It reminds me that giving and receiving are the same. The love that others show to you does not leave them, it increases by being given away freely, just because…
Love has to be given away for the giver to recognize it is theirs to give, and giving it is the way to keep it. This is what your stories do, they are wonderful gifts. Thank you.
Laura J Oliver says
“Giving and receiving are the same.” I love that. Thank you for recognizing how personal these columns are. That’s a risky business and you make me feel that the self disclosure, which is rarely flattering…is the connector I hope for it to be. Thanks for such a thoughtful response!
Deidra Lyngard says
Lovely.
Laura J Oliver says
Thanks so much.
Mark Laurent Pellerin says
THANK YOU
Laura J Oliver says
I appreciate your support of the column very much. Thanks!
Sharon Maiorana says
Such a delicious articule, Laura. I’m thinking maybe it’s because these moments happen that I feel at home in the world. If they stopped it would be a very different world. Thanks for your reflections.
Laura J Oliver says
Thanks so much, Sharon! At home in the world–what a lovely thing to feel and express. Thanks for writing
Patricia says
Such a poignant essay. You’ve left me thinking of all the kindnesses shown to me. So many to thank, including you, Laura Oliver.
Laura J Oliver says
Thank you, Patricia. I think it may have been Rumi who said “there is not one single reason for anything but your joy.”
Mark Roger Bailey says
In Brief Encounters you capture the indelible impact and, at times, magical force of travel’s ephemeral connections with honesty, humor and humanity. Our chance meeting in Fremantle, W.A., long ago was a gift. Our correspondence, collaboration and friendship since keep growing from that first conversation. You are so present in your writing. For a few minutes each week, it’s like we just encountered each other in a strange town and caught up over a cup of coffee.
Laura J Oliver says
Mark, you are one of those people who became an experience–met while traveling, a brief encounter of the forever kind. I am so grateful for each of these gifts and that certainly includes you–fellow writer, artist, traveler. Thanks for reading and writing!