airplane encounter

It's currently 3:00am and I have this sudden urge to finally get down the story of my "airplane encounter" from the ride back from NYC last Monday, April 6th.

I sat down in my assigned window seat, planning to switch with whoever sat in the spot next to all of my close friends. I soon found out that passengers from JFK aren't as amiable or flexible to seat changes. Finally, my last hope for switching seats to a different location comes walking down to his seat. An average-looking man sits down and immediately strikes up a conversation of how I'd need to pay him "a hundred or so dollars" to switch seats with him. He liked the aisle seat. He was awkward and strange. Little did I know...that this man would continue to talk to me for the rest of the trip. Mr. Joe continued to tell me about his job as a real estate manager, his one-room apartment that currently had instruction going on underneath it (to make way for a subway...hmmm. unintentional rhyme), his current trip to go skiing in Utah (our layover), and his interest in music (when he found out that I was on the orchestra trip). As we talked, my interest in a medical profession came up and he simply said, "you'd make a great doctor." Almost any other time, I might've found this man fairly annoying, but something about him grabbed my attention. God seemed to be placing me in this situation to comfort and entertain this lonely man. So I ignored the man trying to sleep in the middle seat and continued to talk. Sadly, I fell asleep due to the ridiculous lack of sleep on the trip. I woke up to him asking if I wanted anything to eat. "Sure, thanks." He gives me his cookie. And then I notice that he's reading an Anatomy text book with another text book underneath. I do a doubletake and remember his random comment to me about being a doctor. So then I have to ask him "what the books are for, and what he does (real estate, really?). It turns out that Mr. Joe had gone to medical school, but didn't feel comfortable taking the boards due to his lack of understanding of "big picture" anatomy. He became a clinical psychologist, but then got bored and became a real estate guy. And now he reads anatomy text books to stimulate his mind...

So this story really has nothing to do with his coincidental medical term. His loneliness just grabbed me and I ended up really enjoying his story and conversation. Honestly I'll never forget Joe, but I'm sure he's back to being an awkward real estate guy in NYC right now. I guess you just have to be open-minded to meet people, even on a crowded airplane from JFK.