Saturday Night in Texas

1.

My Uber driver took me to the wrong terminal this morning.  I'd already told him I was going to Southwest and I assumed he knew where it was, so I wasn't paying attention.   (I was reading the news on my phone of the latest havoc wreaked by the "stable genius" occupant of the White House.)

When I unloaded my two suitcases and large back pack, I discovered that I was in the wrong terminal. In Atlanta, that's a big deal if you're balancing three bags.

The first man I asked for directions happened to be pushing a cart from another airline. "Put your bags here," he said, lifting all three onto his cart. "I'll take you there."

Flash was an African-American man who's worked in the Atlanta airport for forty years.  As we walked to the other terminal, I noticed that person after person smiled when they saw Flash, and that they all had nicknames for each other.

"Hey S-West, how's your mama?"

"Hey, Flash, she's doing better!"

When we reached Southwest, I held out money to pay him for the huge favor, but he refused.

"I knew the minute I saw you with all those bags I was going to help you," he said.  "It's like Moses crossing the Red Sea--you want everybody to get across."

2.

This really happened:

I had plenty of time in Terminal C to eat breakfast.  Five young women were cooking eggs and pancakes and bacon.  (Somebody hadn't shown up for work and they announced that the pancakes were going to take five extra minutes if we wanted to wait.)

Suddenly, two of them started singing, "Lean on me." It started out a little trickle of a song, but then they really got into it and you could hear a choir of five singing and laughing as they helped the pancake pourer pour pancake batter on the griddle.  Then one of the women waiting for her order joined in!

Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on....

You just call on me brother, when you need a hand

We all need somebody to lean on

3.

Yesterday, Carlene rode with me to the Dollar Tree to get her favorite animal crackers. It took a while because the first people in my line were counting out ten dollars in pennies.

The second person in line ahead of me was a curly-haired young man who was returning four items, hoping for a cash refund.

When I asked him how he was doing, he said, "Just trying to make it."

It turns out he's homeless, living in the woods, and his tent had flooded the night before.  He was intent on his exchange and didn't ask me for anything, but I saw in his face a kind of fear that looked new, not the kind of look of one who's been homeless for years and more or less used to it.

"We're just seeing what we can do to get dry for tonight," he said.  Not a complaint, not a request, just a fact.

I offered him a few dollars and he said,   "Bless you, bless you, bless you. Now I can buy a tarp!"

******

So that's how my 2020 started: a stranger helped me across the Red Sea (everything's Biblical in the South); a choir spontaneously sang "Lean on Me,"  and I got to help another stranger in ever-so-small a way to dry out after a night in the soggy red dirt of Georgia and got "blessed" three times for it.