One beautiful flight, one flat tire, one day later, and I was delivered to this place.
Hello everyone! I’ll probably end up posting all of this after the fact, because I’m in the jungle and the internet out here is suuuper spotty. I finally made it to Panama after talking about it nonstop for weeks. It’s like nothing I could have imagined and this trip has been truly beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m going to stretch this out a bit, because there have been so many amazing things about this trip that I can’t fit the past four days into just one post. This week, I want to share the plane ride down to Panama with you. I know that you usually don’t talk about the plane ride as part of the journey, but it had the grandest element of what I’m calling, “serentripity.” It’s like serendipity or fate, only it happens when you’re travelling. New words!
11/30
I walked onto the plane and made some jokes to myself about communism and human trafficking and how similar those things are to flying Spirit Airlines. My ticket said 8A. It was a window seat and it was occupied by an old woman who wouldn’t look me in the eye when I stopped to figure out where .
A lovely young man accross the aisle asked if I would like to sit next to him instead, and seeing how he was a gorgeous latin dude with a huge smile and easy demeanor, I figured, “Hells yes.” But I didn’t say that because “hells yes” sounds so… well it sounds like you’re saying “hells yes.”
An old man sat down beside us and introduced himself as Frank. Well, maybe he didn’t introduce himself then, but we came to know him as Frank somewhere along the way.
I know that David didn’t introduce himself right away. It took awhile for us to get to that point. We started talking about everything and nothing and I soon realized that there was something going on beyond airplane small talk. David is surely young. He looks like he’s just out of high school at a ripe 21 years of age, but he’s a beautifully intelligent and well traveled soul. He was originally from Venezuela and spoke English, Spanish, Hebrew and a number of other languages if I remember correctly. Frank revealed later that he was 85 years old, which is unbelievable. The man is so lively and incredibally sharp. He can operate a smartphone like it’s nobody’s business.
Both David and Frank’s eyes sparkled when they spoke about anything. It seemed that they were both passionate about everything. It wasn’t hard to realize almost immediately that there was something different about this journey.
David sat between Frank and I and he helped call the stewardess over so that Frank could get some Coke and M&M’s. He then took the blame when the stewardess annoyingly told him that there was no need to press the call button. It was a sweet moment.
David kept asking Frank questions and after a short amount of time, Frank was regaling us with stories and jokes for the rest of the plane ride. This was my favorite story told from Frank’s perspective:
When I was young, I played hookey a lot (we explained the phrase ‘play hookey’ to David). And one day I went to school and the teacher, she asked me, “Frank, who wrote the Declaration of Independance?”
And I said, “I don’t know.”
And she kept on and said, “Who wrote the Declaration of Independance?”
And I said, “I don’t know.”
She asked me three or four more times and I still didn’t know, so she said that I had to bring my father into the school the next day so that she could speak to him. I went home and explained to my dad that he would have to come to school, or they wouldn’t let me come back.
The next day, my father came with me to school and the teacher said, “Sir, your son says he can’t tell me who wrote the Declaration of Independance.”
And my dad looked at me and said, “Son. We might be poor, but we’re not liars. If you wrote that thing, you better fess up!”
We all laughed, and laughed, and laughed. I still laugh as I write it down days later. It was just such a sweet moment. More than that. It was a collection of many sweet moments.
Frank started talking about one of his favorite old sandwich shops in Chicago and it turned out that David lived right above it. So David asked Frank out the next time he was in Chicago and I invited myself along. We exchanged information and I rushed off to meet my connecting flight to Panama City. David went off to a meeting in Miami. And Frank went back to his home in Fort Lauderdale. I wonder if they all thought about our encounter in the moments after.
I know I did. As we lifted off, I watched the light from Miami pouring over the black coast and into the sky. Rising above, I stared down at the grid of lights and tried to put everything into a place in my memory. As we reached the hieght of night, I realized that there were too many special moments, too many things that David told me to write down, too many fables and tips from Frank. So I picked a few and allowed the rest to dissolve like street light absorbed by the night sky.
Next time on A Year In Between: Jungle, beach, Panama City, stuff, things, travel, etc… Stay tuned.
