I admire people who manage to write a blog-post every day. Among them are friends like Charlene Notgrass whose heartfelt daily essays never fail to delight and inspire me, particularly in the way she illustrates them with classic artwork and historical photos from agencies like the Smithsonian Institute.
Another writer at the top of my list is a fellow known as “Sean of the South.” Emerging from a difficult, indeed tragic, childhood, Sean Dietrich found his way forward, aided by the love and sensibility of his beloved wife Jamie, to become an essayist, songwriter, and popular performer. In addition, he has become a conduit for untold numbers of people who write with touching stories to share, particularly stories about children soldiering on through extreme medical conditions. You may have to be a Southerner to appreciate some of his style (especially his forays into places like the Waffle House). And while not every essay clicks with me, a big number of them bring me regularly to tears.
I am a reluctant writer, despite spending much of my adult life doing precisely that. In recent years, I write as much as I talk (that’s saying a lot). There’s no shortage of material to write about, either, especially once Hank and I walked into the world of the great educational renewal going on in the U.S. Furthermore, the bountiful travel I do as a speaker for Smithsonian Journeys amplifies the number of topics at my disposal.
Still, having material is one thing. Putting it in written form with the hope of saying something? That is another matter.
I just returned from a blockbuster tour that began in Prague or, to be accurate, began in my beloved Weimar for a few days, then continued by train to Prague to meet my Smithsonian group, then, by bus, to Passau, where we embarked on a ship that sailed down the Danube, east past Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, and on to Vidin, Bulgaria. After disembarking there, we took a bus across the Carpathian Mountains to the stunning city of Sofia, Bulgaria. Needless to say, I am fully dizzy with impressions from that route.
But the experience I write today involved a moment far removed from that exotic route. It occurred in the noisy baggage-claim area of Chicago’s O’Hare airport when, after many (trust me, many) hours of flying, starting in pre-dawn Bulgaria, I was trotting up and down the beltway, seeking my new black suitcase. It’s so new, it isn’t battered up enough for me to recognize it! How stupid I felt, not to have put a ribbon or other colorful marking on it.
That’s when I heard the voice of an older woman plaintively asking something of the young couple behind me. Her question was in Ukrainian. My ear jumped to her immediately—after all, I had just left a place where not only Bulgarian, but a swirl of Slavic languages could be heard.
The woman was seeking help with something she could not explain in English. The couple seemed kind. They looked at the scrap of paper she held up to them, but didn’t grasp her need. So, they shrugged and said, “Sorry.” I asked her what she needed. Hearing me speak to her in Russian (as close as I was going to get to Ukrainian), she broke into a smile and then, frantically, showed me the same paper. A number was scrawled across that strip of paper in the almost illegibly florid handwriting that Slavic people seem to learn in school.
I first thought it was a reference number for the luggage she was seeking. Then I realized it was a phone number. She had no cell phone, yet needed someone to call that number—her daughter’s! She needed to find out what to do in this strange new land of America if her suitcase wasn’t appearing (which it wasn’t). She needed to know how to go through the last part of the immigration and customs without a suitcase. Surely someone coming from so far away needed a suitcase to prove her legitimacy, right?
It was easy to reassure her, dial the number for her, and put her in contact with her daughter, who advised her simply to walk through and come to the other side, where she would start the claim for the lost luggage. The woman thanked me with tears in her eyes, then stepped close, and leaned her shoulder gently, warmly against mine, but for a second. I went to hug her back, but she shot out of there like a jackrabbit.
When I got past customs, she was nowhere to be seen. Surely she was safe under the wing of her daughter, and you can just imagine their mutual relief.
What are the odds that someone like me would be standing in the spot where this woman was trying to jump across a language barrier (as well as a logistical barrier)? It is precisely in such chance moments that the most magical experiences of our daily lives take place. I have nostalgia for the era of my youth, when people could be far more confident extending themselves to strangers. To take an extreme example, you really could, generally speaking, pick up folks who were hitchhiking and it would be alright.
For that matter, I had my own experiences of hitchhiking in my late teens with someone all the way from North Carolina to Texas—unfathomable to think of doing now. It was an amazing trip: highlights included my first time to try catfish as a trade-off from a trucker who offered us catfish dinners once we got to Arkansas in exchange for helping unload crates of Mrs. Paul’s Eggplant into a food warehouse on the west side of the Mississippi. The hitchhike back East found me sitting literally underneath the belly of a pony that had just been purchased at a small County Fair. The parents sat in the big front seat of a 1963 winged-fin sedan with their 3 kids squashed between them (no seatbelts then); the pony was in the backseat, its head out one window, its tail out the other, not happy about the manner of transport or the couple of hitchhikers wedged under his stomach. (Just like Little Nicker!)
Let us all pray for more moments when we’re the ones who have both the cell phone and the ability to break through to someone in need. Let there be instants when we recall stuffing a handful of band aids in our backpacks that can help a child who falls in the park. Let us feel okay about giving our umbrella to someone who needs it more, since we have a waterproof-parka. We might get it back, or we might not, but two people will be dry, and that’s important.
No matter where we look, there are needs for kindness. The impulse to do kindness to others is in us. It is put there divinely and, ideally, cultivated from childhood. Above all, we need to pray for a world where it’s not just safe, but ordinary, to extend ourselves and fearlessly render aid of all kinds. These are not just gestures of kindness, but the essential fuel of humanity, if we are to live our lives fully. They are the quiet moments that bring substance and meaning to our days on this earth.