An Interesting Person
It was late, dark, unlit if you will. I thought I might get an early start on my trip but I was a bit too groggy. I went back to sleep and woke up a few minutes later.
It was still dark.
So I turned on the lights, naturally. Ironically enough just about the time the light in the room was flashing on, one flashed on in my head. Perhaps one of them is light? I said to myself. Lights are good, we need them a fair amount. I turned off the light and tested out the theory. Indeed, the luminous light was quite helpful when moving around even the most familiar of apartment floor plans.
I turned the light back on and proceeded to get dressed. I wrote down lights on my notebook as a possibility. I would find out later on that it wasn’t one.
It all started about 3 weeks ago. Not that long ago, in fact, but long enough to make it worthy of a flashback. A person came up to me, an interesting person of around her late teens, asking this and that. I didn’t fully know her at the time, but I knew enough to know she might have a good question. Luckily enough, for me…and this story, she did. She queried to me, “What are the 8 most important things in the world?”
It’s really one of those questions that during the conversation you just try and come up with a few, but realize it’s going to be way to difficult to answer so you move on to another topic. But, it’s also one of those questions that after the conversation, you think about over and over again as you’re trying to fall asleep.
Easy enough, I’ll answer it, right?
Well a few nights of trying to fall asleep ensued and I never quite came up with the answer. With it burning in my head, I decided to take a trip. I would survey the world in hopes of finding the elusive eight things. My first stop: the airport.
And so there I was, with a light on, in my apartment, suitcases ready to go, and a shower ready to clean me. I did all the necessary things to get ready: made sure I had my passport, a big fanny pack to make me look like a tourist, scratch that, my wallet, my keys, my plane ticket, and a big spiral notebook which so far only contained one question and a possible answer.
I took a taxi up Interstate 75 to the
Security! Everyone needs security, right? I wrote it down on my list. It seemed like a certain possibility.
I waited for my flight and eventually boarded US Airways
Flight 3890 to
I had a 3 hour layover so I decided I might start my interviews. Luck would have it that my first interview would debunk the possibility I had written down only 2 hours ago. He was a man from somewhere in what I would assume be the Middle East. I could make up a name or a nationality, but I doubt my guesses would be anything close to accurate.
I talked to him for what seemed like a day. His dark furrowed brows and deep brown eyes told me stories of woe and struggle, strife and conflict. He grew up with only his older brother, his parents and other siblings either dead or missing. He learned to shoot a gun at age 8, had killed a man at 10. In his days of what would seem like a very stressful upbringing, he made it clear that security was of no necessity to him. If anything it was an unknown word. The danger, the thought of death did not bother him, he said. He had squared that fear when one day, when he was only seventeen, he saw his brother, the most fearless man he knew, sprawled over in a pool of dark red blood. He was shot 13 times in the abdomen and midsection, the life torn from him before the fifth bullet entered the chamber of the killer’s rifle.
His was a harrowing story, to say the least. I left the seat with a sullen glaze filtered over everything I saw. It seemed as though everything had stopped, and a trail of red drops was following me everywhere I went.
I made it a case to make sure I never asked people if they had a suggestion for one of the eight things. I didn’t want to make people create answers; I wanted to find answers in their story. If they offered one so be it, I would add it to the list. Security, it would seem, fell off the list. I added a new one in its stead: guidance. Certainly he wouldn’t have survived without the help and advice from his brother.
Things sped up in my mind, of course. When you’re in a concourse of international and domestic passengers going every which way across the country, you tend to speed up get back in a hurry. The world spins fast, right? Might as well move with it.
I boarded my next flight, US Airways 1426 in service to
Charles de Gaulle International Airport. That’s CDG for you Americans, LFPG for
most pilots, or
I’m not quite sure why I decided to go to
Considering
Well.
I rather say he bumped into me. He was an old Parisian,
about 80 years old, adorned with a balding head and a slight hunch. He was very
much your typical old bald man stereotype. My natural instinct was to yelp out
a quiet “Sorry” but as it came out I remembered where I was and began to speak
in French when he quickly cut me off. The man explained to me that he preferred
people speak in their native tongue in moments of apology. He felt the words
carried more meaning when people knew exactly what they meant. I politely
agreed and after some exchanging of information, we ended up taking a gentle
walk along the side streets of
The fact that our conversation occurred during a walk on a busy, narrow street isn’t worth mentioning most times, but it was this time.
He was blind.
It didn’t seem to bother him, though. He strolled along the roadway with ease, dodging what came at him. Our talking eventually came to a point where I asked him how he knew what time of day it was when he woke up. He replied that he could feel the light in the window. There’s a certain air, he said, that follows the daytime and the night. It wasn’t the noise or the scent or the touch, it was the feeling.
Now, you are all very smart readers and I’m sure you can figure out what comes next, but before I do I must share a story of his. I can’t say it relates to much of anything, at least not pertaining to my quest. It was just a good story that I felt interesting.
He said that one day back in his thirties, he came across a bridge. It was a nice small stone bridge that overlooked a 10 foot wide gully. When he got on top of that bridge he had this deep feeling in his chest that there was something waiting for him on it. It was this mixed bag of excitement and long lasting patience. He stayed there for a while but as the sun settled down the feeling went away. He came back the next day and in the afternoon the feeling came back to him.
This processed repeated itself for about a month until one day, a particularly sunny day according to what he sensed, a woman touched him on his shoulder. It wasn’t a long lost cousin, a mom, and grandmother, a daughter; it was a woman that according to him, he knew instantly. She told him that she had been waiting to cross that bridge on that day and knew that he had been waiting for her.
He didn’t tell me anything besides that. I looked on his fingers to see signs of a mark, on his cheeks to see perhaps some lipstick residue, but I couldn’t discern anything that would indicate she became his wife. I can’t say I know anything else about the story except that it’s interesting perhaps because that’s all I know.
I scratched off light from the list and I moved on. I went to the train station but not the passenger one. I didn’t want to know where I was going; it would be more faithful to my trip. I instead went to the freight train station, picked a car, and went to sleep. Jet lag, as it seems, is a very convincing way to fall asleep.
Some time later, whether it was a day, a week, or a month, I
don’t know, I awoke on the side of a train track in the neutral zone of Cyprus.
It’s interesting that a train took me to
She, not he, for those who are keeping track of gender in my story, was a lovely woman of some age past 24. I can’t give an exact estimate because her features wear clearly worn down by the life of labor she had endured every day since she could remember. She was a mercenary, a word that sort of catches you off balance when you hear it nowadays. It’s one of those occupations like being a pirate that when you hear your mind reels and has to take a few steps back from the situation.
She helped me up, the dust on my clothes falling off in big clouds. I coughed in the dust and she began to question me, which makes sense because I’d have a lot of questions for someone I found covered in dust on the side of a train track in a random island. I told her what I was doing and she received it quite well. Apparently telling people you’re looking for answers to big philosophical questions is better than a get-out-of-jail-free card.
We walked along a trail as she explained to me where I was and how I might proceed on moving on in my travels. I happened to be in the United Nations-administered buffer zone between Greek Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus. She was a mercenary hired to aid in the peacekeeping effort. Since we had a long walk, I asked her some questions about her life and I listened. She balked at first, saying that she didn’t really have any structured life with friends or family. Eventually though she let down her guard (literally, she put her G36C rifle over her shoulder and holstered her Beretta 92F 9mm pistol. How she held a rifle and a pistol in two hands I still have no idea).
She was right in saying she had no concrete stories. Her
life was more of a blur. She grew up an orphan in
Damnit!
Feeling!
I forgot that part. I do apologize, I should have put it in my section with the old blind but I’m on a typewriter and I really can’t go back and edit it. When I heard the old man’s story I added feeling to the list. After all, it seemed pretty important. I can’t believe I actually thought I would remember something that didn’t have much to do with the story at all. Of course it did, fool!
Oh well, you readers would have picked up on it I’m sure. Anyways, the woman explained to me that all she had ever known was work. She moved from job to job, eventually learning the art of firearms from farmhands that had to hunt as apart of their food pyramid. She found out that she had a certain aptitude for pointing and shooting and thought that it wasn’t a bad life to do that everyday. Now, this wasn’t the point-and-shoot you do with the new digital cameras, this was the type of point-and-shoot where you point at people…and shoot them…with bullets.
But she wasn’t too keen on orders and discipline and tradition. She liked to learn as she went, move in the moment. The military was, obviously, not her first choice. Her skills would be much more apt to a life as a mercenary. I asked her how she learned all these new fangled skills, what she remembered about things. She said that it wasn’t important to her. All her life every day presented her with a challenge. She approached it, defeated it, and moved on with skillful agility. She said she never really took a careful log of things.
Eventually she moved up the ranks of the mercenaries. She was the type of woman that you might think would make a big name for herself, but it never happened. She remained anonymous, like a cloud of dust, a shadow. She said that maybe that was the best way to describe her life: dusty, orange dusty. She didn’t know why, but when she looked back she saw an orange cloud.
That’s about all she had to say. She led me to the nearest town and we parted our ways. She said she would remember me not as orange, but as something brighter, a different color perhaps. I picked up all my things and continued to my next destination. As I walked I scratched guidance off the list. She was certainly not a person who lived by the help of others, she paved her own way. That’s an appropriate figure of speech considering she always seemed to be fighting in places that didn’t have many paved roads.
And that’s how my adventure went along for the most part. I’d find a new person, add things to the list, scratch things off the list. Some items stayed on for a while, some were taken down the very next day. I went through quite a few pages over the years. I’m not quite sure how long I was gone. You lose track of time going through so many time zones, so many different types of sun patterns. It’s interesting to see the sun toward the North instead of the South in a Southern Hemisphere winter.
Every so often I’d find out new bits and pieces of
information about the people I had met or the places I had visited. I learned
that the woman in
I learned a lot, saw a lot, felt a lot, heard a lot, sensed a lot, watched a lot.
A lot. A lot. A lot. A lot.
But I stopped. Eventually I reached the end. I didn’t have any place to go and it was just time to go back.
And there I was, on a Boeing 747 from
I was sitting in my chair on the flight as I was gently relaxed by the low hum of the 2 engines to my left when I decided to start looking on what I had found, what I did remember. Interestingly enough in my backpack I found something that I definitely did not expect to see. In there were 3 objects that had somehow entered without my knowing. At the bottom of my bag covered in some finer pieces of dust I saw a gold ring, a necklace, and a bracelet.
The ring was a simple one. It was a gold band that on the inside simply read “Wait.” The necklace had a pendant on the end. It was very simple and elegant. It was a picture etched in silver of three shields. The bracelet was somewhat more complicated. It had 5 charms attached to the main band. Four of them were a variety of beautiful stars in gold. The last one was a little bit bigger. I got out a magnifying lens and looked closer. It was a detailed map of the summer’s night sky in impossible accuracy. On the back it was very blurry and grainy, worn down by time. In the middle it simply said, “Remember This Much” in extremely tiny italics.
The puzzle of what they were and how they got there was a bit much for me. I kept them over the decades and thought about them everyday. In the end they never had an idea for me. I think though, I have a minor inclination of who they had an idea for. It changes often though.
At the moment I just mused at their beauty, examining the small clues they left. I decided to concentrate on my notebook. During the last hour of the flight, as we descended down toward The Angels (TAX), I contemplated if I had found 8 things. I decided I hadn’t but I had found eight answering words in a neatly packaged sentence.
From TAX I went to DFW and then finally back to
She so happened to be living in
As you might expect, it took a while to find her. I eventually met up with her at dinner, the answering machine did its job. I didn’t expect her to call back really. My message went along the lines of, “Well, you probably don’t remember me, but we talked one time back in…and you asked me a big question.”
We sat down in once of Chicago’s finer restaurants and before I even got the first word to express how silly I thought this was she cut me off and said “No it’s not.” She asked me about my trip for a while and eventually I asked her if she wanted to know what I had found. She nodded yes and I told her what I tell you.
Everyone is different and eight things always change. They’re never the same from place to place, never the same from year to year. Just by itself this point really isn’t all that new. Hell, Zach figured it out in the college years of Saved by the Bell. The key is that those differences have an amazingly powerful implication. They are what makes you, makes me, makes us, and made her, an interesting person.