For Wilshire Baptist Church
Looking at the photo on the book cover — a blur of pedestrians crossing a busy city street — I wondered where it was taken. I noticed that a street sign was in Spanish, and that the buses were blue and red and the taxis were black and gold. With those fragments of visual cues loaded into an image searching site on the Internet, I found a broader crop of the same image and then the exact location: Santiago, Chile.
That brought back a long-filed-away memory. It was 1994 and I was working for an airline finance magazine. I was completely out of my depth with the content, but one day the boss said he was sending me to a Latin American airline conference and air show in Santiago to soak up knowledge and report on whatever I found interesting. The air show was terrific, I recall nothing about the conference, but I’ll never forget the getting there.
I was to fly from Dallas to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Miami, and finally on to Santiago. The flight from Atlanta to Miami was delayed, and by the time I got to the gate in Miami for the overnight flight to Santiago, it was too late. The plane was still at the gate — I could see it out the terminal windows – but they had sealed the door and were pushing back and there was no coming back to get us.
I say “us” because there were about 10 of us who had been left behind due to the missed connection. By then it was midnight, and the airline took us all in a van to a little hotel in Coral Gables. Everything was fine — we weren’t sleeping in the airport — but at 7 a.m. the room phone rang and a voice on the other end said, “The van is here to take you back to the airport — NOW!” There were two problems with that: I wasn’t ready to go, and the next flight to Santiago didn’t leave until 11 p.m.
The 10 of us climbed wearily into the van and were dropped off at the airport where we had 15 hours to kill. If you’ve traveled through Miami International Airport, you know that it is the gateway to Latin America. The concourses were narrow and crowded in that day, and in that sea of constantly moving humanity the 10 of us became an island of calm for each other. Misery loves company and all of that, so we stayed together. Our common bond was being stranded in a place we didn’t want to be.
We had lunch and dinner together and got to know a little about each other over airport food. One in the group was a fellow Baylor graduate and a geologist or something like that and he was going to South America for some sort of research. Another man was in sales for a Chilean domestic paper products company — tissues and toilet paper. He had been in the United States for a convention and was going home, so I got some inside scoop on Santiago.
In between those meals we browsed the airport shops like zombies and hung out together in empty boarding gates to read books and magazines or take naps. Smart phones and tablets and the digital diversions they provide hadn’t been invented yet.
When the time finally came to board the plane, we wished each other well and got into line with the other passengers. But I discovered that my partner in the two seats between the side aisle and the windows was the paper salesman. We both tried to sleep on the eight-hour overnight flight, but in our wakefulness we continued our conversation and I learned more about the paper business and his family. His first language was Spanish and his skin was brown, but when we exchanged business cards, I was surprised to see he had an Eastern European surname. He explained that his grandparents left Europe at the turn of the 20th century and settled in Chile.
When we landed the next morning, my seatmate called his wife and then told me they would give me a ride to my hotel. When the car came, his wife and young son climbed in the back seat and he invited me to sit up front. As he drove through the busy streets of Santiago, he alternated speaking to me in English and to his family in Spanish, and especially to his son who I imagine must have been curious about the stranger in the front seat. I just smiled because after 24 hours of feeling like a poor wayfaring stranger, for a few moments I felt like a part of a family. When we got to the hotel, I thanked them and shook hands. We said we’d be in touch but of course we never were.
That picture I mentioned that started me telling this story is on the cover of my new book, “Together: Thoughts and Stories About Living in Community.” My publisher picked the photo from their stock image source and I signed off on it because I liked the way it portrayed people “together” in the swirl of life. But now that I know that it is a Santiago street scene, it is more than just symbolic. It reminds me of a time when being “in community” with strangers helped me get through what would have been a very long and lonely day.