By Dave Crow
Conversations
David Crow
November is a travel month. By the time this column goes to press I will have flown nearly 3,600 miles and driven a bunch too. People all over the country will board planes, trains, buses and drive their cars to go from one place to another.
I don’t particularly enjoy traveling, but I don’t hate it either. It can be stressful due to crowds and strange schedules and delays. In the end, a lot of travel time is spent waiting, which I’m not very good at. Whether it’s sitting in an airport waiting for a plane or sitting in a car waiting for the mile markers to pass, there is a surprising amount of down time with traveling.
Over the years I’ve learned a few tricks that help me pass that time. I always bring a big thick book when I travel; a book so thick I’ll never finish it during the trip. For some reason the idea that I’ll never run out of words to read makes the travel time seem shorter. I bring a book of crossword puzzles handy to wake up my brain cells, so I don’t sink into a travel nap. The writer in me requires a pen and paper on which to scratch out a travel journal or doodle out ideas.
As I’ve traveled around, I’ve found that there are really two ways to travel. The first way is to plug into a book or an electronic device, burrow down into one’s own space and silently endure the inevitable waits and delays of traveling. It works. As you can see from the last paragraph, I use it myself. Sometimes you simply must gut it out.
However, there is a second way to travel, and I’m quite a fan of it. I call it the conversational approach to travel. The conversational approach helps those long waits and lines seem to slide by rather than drag, and when practiced with care it can transform those inevitable waits and delays from something to be endured to something to be enjoyed. All that is required is a simple realization: everyone around you has a story.
A carload of people you’ve known your whole life is full of stories. Mass transportation, like planes and trains, is rife with people who have a story. Every other traveler you encounter when you travel is leaving somewhere and going somewhere else. Everyone has a reason for their travels; that is their story.
Last weekend I flew to Florida to see my brother, and on the way home I had a seven-hour layover in Atlanta. When you’re sitting around your home, seven hours doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but when you’re parked in a semi-comfortable chair in an airport searching for a place to plug in so your cell phone doesn’t die, seven hours can seem like a stint in Dante’s purgatory; you haven’t gone all the way to hell, but you can see hell from there. Thanks to the conversational approach, my seven-hour layover didn’t seem that long.
A man and his teenaged children sat down next to me in an airport waiting area. I moved my backpack a bit so he could have some room for his luggage, and he nodded his thanks. He sat down with a long sigh of exhaustion. I asked him if he’d had a long trip; he chuckled and nodded again. We shared a couple of knowing dad-chuckles about traveling with teenagers, and then I asked him about the purpose of his trip.
I’ll spare you the details of the conversation that ensued. It would be unfair of me to share his story because it is his story to share. I will tell you that because he chose to share his story with me, it didn’t seem that long until the flight attendant called for people to board the flight to Hartford. I hadn’t even noticed that the seven-hour layover had become an eight-hour layover because my flight had been delayed an hour. Such is the power of a good conversation; it can turn an eight-hour wait in travel purgatory into a memory.
So, if you’re traveling this November, you have two options. You can either delve into your giant tome with your earbuds in and endure the trip, or you can take a chance and ask the person next to you where they’re going or where they have been. Either way you’ll pass the time. But the second method might make the trip into a memory.
Y’all come out!
David Crow lives in Orange with his wife and three children. He practices law and he asks everyone to call him “Dave.” Only his mother and his wife call him “David,” and only when they’re mad at him. You can contact Dave at Sit.a.Spell.and.Visit@gmail.com. He’ll always find a half hour for a good chat.