Divine Intervention

By Ariana 

Travel journalists and bloggers spend a fair amount of time and detail describing the exotic places we’ve gone and the exciting adventures we had while we were there but we all too often overlook everything that comes between our place of origin and our final destination.  We assume that the airport, the plane, the boat, the train, and the bus are places of little or no consequence.  They are the places that should be hurried through on the way to our next adventure, an adventure which we can all be sure will occur in a place that is far more exciting than a bus terminal.  That is not to say, however, that these places of transition and modes of transportation completely lack any interest whatsoever.  In fact, one of my most formative travel experiences occurred in an airport.

Directly following graduation from college I went on a trip to visit Europe with my friend Elise and stay with her relatives in Italy and in France.  We were supposed to meet in the Washington Dulles Airport and fly to Italy together, unfortunately, all did not go according to plan.  Elise caught the flight to Italy but I got stuck in the Dulles airport because of a tornado (yes a tornado, I had previously thought that much like the rain in Spain tornados kept mainly to the plain, but I was, apparently very wrong).

I convinced myself that it was fate that I was stuck all alone overnight in Washington DC because of the flight that Elise made and I missed.  I decided that the obese middle-aged man sitting next to me on the flight to Dulles, the one who spent the entire flight edging closer to me (on the pretext that he was trying to move away from the stench emanating off of the man sitting in the window seat), might just be my soul mate.  He had, after all, offered to buy me dinner when we got off the plane, perhaps this was a sign.  But he was not my soul mate because the customer service line beckoned and, irrationally, I decided to turn down free dinner and drinks with my "soul mate" because somewhere in the masochistic region of my brain I decided that waiting in a line that spanned several terminals of the Dulles airport was, actually, preferable to a free dinner.

It was just as well, because while I was waiting in this aforementioned line I met God.  I suppose that was a very imprecise way of saying it.  Now you are probably expecting me to go into some epic conversion story along the lines of Emperor Constantine.  Or you will argue with the phrasing and try to convince me that it was not God who waited in line with me but rather one of his messengers.  Or if you are a skeptic you will try to convince me that it was merely a coincidence and that I attributed his presence to a divine power.  Or if you are particularly religious you might tell me it was nothing of the sort and that even thinking that I had met God let alone telling everybody about it is irreverent and disrespectful and I will probably rot in hell.  And you may be right and you can call it what you will but I will call it my meeting with God and it occurred at approximately 6pm on the 4th of June in the year 2008 in the United International Flights customer service line at the Washington Dulles Airport.
God was of medium build and he had a mustache (but not a beard). He was middle-aged and if you are the sort to care about

Sitting on Elise's grandmother's bed in Marina di Pisa, Italy, wearing one of her grandmother's classy 80s-style puff paint shirts

ethnicity then I will inform you that God was Sri Lankan.  God and his wife and two daughters had missed their flight to India, which meant that they also missed their flight to Sri Lanka. God was (as you would very well expect him to be) incredibly profound. He was very calm.  God was (also as you might expect) the only person in the line who wasn't bitching and moaning.

His argument was that he would get there eventually, but there wasn't anything he could do to make himself get there faster so why bother getting all worked up about it.  I felt like God definitely had a point there.  As I stood next to him in line I had this strong desire to be more like him.  I decided that from then on I wasn't going to try to fight the divine will, or luck, or fate, or whatever you may call it for control. I was just going to float and see what happened and just have faith that things would turn out all right in the end (which is not really a departure from my previous belief, but this God in the customer service line just sort of reaffirmed it.)

When I finally arrived at Elise's grandparents' house in Italy without my baggage, I heeded the lesson that I had learned fromthis travel God.  I didn’t allow my lack of luggage spoil my trip.  I merely wore Elise’s grandmother's clothes (which were frightful in a hilarious sort of way) all around Pisa.