I wonder how many people an average person meets in his lifetime. I actually think about that quite often, when I’m on the subway, at the airport, or, like now, sitting at a coffee shop. And when I think about meeting people, I mean connecting, not just being in the same place at the same time.
For example, I haven’t really met that bald man in front me, even if we just had eye contact. (Then we both looked away). Those two women to my right, with their cool glasses and salads and scarfs, aren’t people I’ve met, in these official meetings statistics.
They could be.
All it takes is for me to get up, and say hi to them. They’d say hi, and then I would stand there silent, creating an awkward situation, forcing me to leave this coffee shop, so I won’t do it.
But I could.
People cross paths, sometimes connecting, if only for a short time, and then, like ants that get thrown off the table, we just keep on walking to the new direction, as if nothing had happened.
One day, my first summer back at my parents during my college years, my parents came home from a drive with a new friend. They had been driving home from Helsinki, and saw a hitchhiker along the way. Inspired by who knows what, they stopped and gave him a ride. To our house.
Armed with a tiny dictionary, the Japanese young man was traveling in Finland on his own. He had no camera. I know this because all three of us asked him about it, no doubt stunned to meet a Japanese tourist who didn’t have a camera. He just pointed to his eyes and told us that they were his camera.
“I’m a Japonikese,” he said in very broken Finnish.
That was pretty much all he said.
To this day, Mom calles Japanese people Japonikese.
The young man, whose name I’ve forgotten a long time ago, stayed at our house one night, long enough to eat a truckload of meat balls, but the next morning, we threw his bag in my Beetle, and listening to Whitesnake’s 1987, I drove him to his next destination, a town some 100 kilometers north.
I dropped him off at the tourist information office, got in my car, and before hitting the road again, I ejected the cassette, flipped it over, and pushed it back in to listen to side B: Boston’s Don’t Look Back.
I do wonder, a little bit, if our Japanese friend was somewhere close to the earthquake, taking photos with his eyes.
While living in the Azores, I once brought a young pilot back to our house from the AFB. He wanted to shop in our town, Praia, and I figured I could save him the taxi ride. The shops were closed for lunch so we killed time in the coffee shop. I think back to that time—knowing it’s something I’d never do at home— and hope that he is safe.