terry again

Here's a repost of something I wrote two years ago on another blog. Reposting it now because I'm about to fly away and I hope to rekindle some of that enthusiasm for connecting with strangers that I felt so passionately about at the end of my time in Chicago.

There was a light sprinkling of rain and a few bolts of lightning in Chicago on Friday, so all outgoing flights from O'Hare were canceled. Terminals B and C were overflowing with travelers, who waited petulantly in hundred-person lines for hours for refunds or reroutes, sat on the tile near electrical outlets with their laptops burning their crotches, and lay supine on the heating vents with Cubs caps pulled over their eyes. I was trying to get to Boston. My flight was first delayed 45 minutes, then two hours, then three, and we shuttled from one gate to another awaiting, what we discovered later, a fictional flight that was never to take off.

At B5, I dozed and snapped photographs of fellow travelers. It was a rare chance to document so many expressions of unhappiness under one roof. I was at peace because I had a soft serve. I was sitting right next to the people standing in line for the United attendant, so I watched them and listened to their conversations. One man had the face of a 38 year-old but wore screened t-shirts, thick leather bracelets, and dark jeans adorned with decorative flat chains in the style of somebody fifteen years younger, in a nightclub, in Hackensack; he touched himself on the biceps and abdomen and adjusted the cuff of his jeans several times, but the intended audience for his presentation was unclear. One man had a small cell phone device in his ear and looked right at me and shouted directions, which I assumed were not for me. I heard a boy named Terry tell a man named Mario about the missionary work he was planning to do.

Half an hour later, Terry sat down next to me. I asked him whether he was going to Boston like me, but he said he was going to New York. We didn't say anything else for a few minutes, but I looked over and smiled a few times, and eventually I said, I couldn't help but overhear that you were going to do missionary work in New York. What exactly are you doing? and from there, our conversation took off.

Terry was 20 years old and headed for a six-week mission in Brooklyn. He was on summer break from his studies in marketing at a small state college in Michigan. He would be leading a group of fifty teenagers from as far away as Canada in restoration projects on a church on Flatbush Avenue whose motto was "Doing Good in the Hood Since 1654." He wasn't going with his church members; his only partner would be a girl about his age whom he had only met once before, at the previous week's mission orientation. He and his crew would be living in the dormitory connected to the church. He hadn't been to New York, but he was excited to go, and he asked me where he should go and what he should do. I said that he might like the city upon first impression but feelings of love would develop after he exhausted his tourist sites and turned to the people around him. He asked where the restaurant from Seinfeld was, and I gave him precise directions and added my own trivia to his understanding of the storefront, but he didn't appear to care too much about Suzanne Vega. Terry had the letters "WWJD" repeated in scrolling text on a tight blue bracelet around his wrist. He wore a baseball cap and glasses, and was exceedingly polite, without being formal, in the way he addressed me.

He was from Niles, Michigan, a town of 15,000 just north of the Indiana border. He said he was from the "cornfields," and that his college was in a town that was even more full of cornfields. He'd spent the entire day, starting from 8 a.m. shuttling by car and regional jet between his hometown and Grand Rapids and O'Hare, and here he was at 6 p.m. a bit tired from travel but happy to have already met so many interesting people. I liked his attitude, and told him this. I said I liked meeting people, but you don't know whether they want to be meeting you. We agreed it was nice when two people who didn't know each other both wanted to talk. One can get a sense of another's values in the way they talk about even value-neutral subjects, like whether to be irritated by a long day of rain delays, or in the simple fact that they will talk openly with a stranger. Maybe it is foolish or dangerous of me to go on believing in strangers like this, but I trusted Terry immediately.

I suppose Terry was something of a cliche, because he was kind, polite, genuine small-town boy who expressed unpretentious, open-mouthed awe when I told him about the institutions I'd been affiliated with ("Is Harvard really as hard as everyone says it is?") and who spoke of his (paltry) summer salary like it was an unfathomable sum of money. It only made me like him more. He wanted to know more about what I liked about New York. The liveliness, I said. Go to the Mermaid Parade. (He was fascinated.) Go to Central Park on a Saturday. Go to the gay pride parade.

At this, he hesitated. Well, you know, I don't know if I would personally feel comfortable about that because of my religion, he said. I had with purpose instructed him to go to Pride; I am making the slow transition from sustaining conversations with strangers by pretending to be more politically moderate than I am to actually speaking my mind, but doing so without breathing stranger-repellent radical fire; so I felt too a gentle missionary zeal in speaking to my missionary about matters of the spirit.

Terry was hesitant but not insulting, and not even conservative. He spoke about his personal discomfort - "I" statements - not about other people's sins. He was a good boy, a curious boy, a cornfield boy compelled by New York, so even though his brain had been taught to close, his heart was wide open. I am gay, I said, and some parts of the parade make even me feel uncomfortable (I said this with the Log Cabin Republicans in mind), but it's good to go and see that people are people no matter how different their identities might seem from yours. Or something equally platitudinous, and probably less grammatical, came out of my mouth; I was trying so hard. Terry responded immediately by talking about how one of his friends had come out to him but prefaced his remarks by saying that Terry was the last person he had come out to. This remark saddened Terry, because he felt that some "out there" Christians had made it seem like the whole religion was about hating other people. Terry sounded hurt when he said that Christianity was about love. God is love. He said he protested against the conservative protesters at his school, because he didn't like how they made others feel.

We drifted from this topic into the next: cops and lawyers. Everybody considered the cops in his small town corrupt. Terry had been pulled over and given a ticket for having expired car insurance because he had shown the cop two copies of his insurance papers, one of which was older than the more recent set. The cop was corrupt, the magistrate presiding over the case was corrupt, and in the end he felt that he had been roughed up by a bunch of jackasses. There was no justice. Contempt for corrupt authority, God as love, curiosity - my dear, dear boy.

Over the intercom, the kiosk attendant announced, triumphantly, that Seating Area 1 was permitted to board. I shook hands with Terry and left, because it was time for me to fly to Boston. Terry wrote down my email address and we shall see if I ever have occasion to see my dear missionary again. I left it up to him.

Seconds after the attendant made the boarding announcement, she got back on the intercom and said, pausing heavily, "Well...sorry folks, but...it looks like your flight has been canceled." This was uproarious for the crowd, who raged, and also uproarious for me, because I found the comedy utterly delightful. O'Hare and its gentle Christians could not control the 12th largest downpour in Chicago history, and there was nothing to do but laugh and laugh! The delays and detours resulting from this uproarious announcement also gave me the opportunity to have half hour conversations with two additional strangers, Blake and Klaus, which I will document here tomorrow.