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While I waited in line to board my plane to get to my family reunion this
summer, a man standing next to me sighed in exasperation as he noticed the
attendant checking people through was a trainee. He told me how his flight
had been canceled without warning or notice, and when he had come to the
airport to change his flight, he had been sent to the wrong terminal and
had only happened by chance to notice that error in time.
After telling me all this and saying, "I will never fly this
airline again", he asked me, "What next? How bad can it
get?" I raised my eyebrows in surprise, and asked him if that is
really the question he wants an answer to. I added that I usually ask,
"How good can it get?" when things seem to be going wrong...
because I often find unexpected delights and discover that what seemed to
be all wrong turns out to be just right.
My own patience was tried on this very flight, because I had
gone to the terminal ticket booth hoping to change my seat assignment to be
closer to the front of the plane... but the very same trainee had handled
my request, and the time between her telling me "There is a seat in
row eleven" and actually typing a key sequence to reserve that seat
was too long... someone else took that seat.
I ended up keeping my same seat assignment toward the back
of the plane, and discovered that a very tired two-year-old child and her
equally tired elderly caretaker were seated next to me. I handed the child
some paper and a pen and for a while, she stopped fussing and enjoyed a few
minutes of artistic creative bliss. This bliss literally only lasted a few
minutes before she began crying again... when the food cart saved the
day... for a few more minutes.
I knew that while I had no toys with me, I could still make
a puppet out of the little barf bag in the seat pocket ahead of me, so I
did. I drew the face of a dog on the puppet and barked as I made the
puppet look like it was barking. Ashley was charmed, and so we played this
game for some time. I folded her drawing paper into an Origami bowl, and
made the letter W out of more little pieces of paper, folding them like
chewing gum wrappers into a paper chain.
I began to realize that if I had not sat next to Ashley and
her grandmother, this flight would have been a very different experience
for all of us! By the end of this flight, Ashley was giggling hysterically
at me as I jumped and pantomimed exaggerated reactions to her sudden noises
and body movements.
It felt good to walk in both worlds... both the everyday
world of daily concerns and the mystical world of one-ness. As Francis
Thompson once wrote: