Can You Picture It?
A member of Minnesota royalty sang a very popular song in the 80s. The first line asks you to imagine a scenario. So, I’ll ask your permission to imagine something with me. If you, the reader, weren’t reading this, I would ask you to close your eyes. But in the meantime:
“Dig, if you will, a picture…”
People begin to filter into the gate area. It’s an hour before the flight, and passengers are getting comfortable. A voice from overhead squawks instruction that I won’t be following since I don’t understand German at all. I settle in and begin with my routine people-watching. Throughout the world, and in every airport, it’s all the same. Travelers are pretty hard up to find anything uncommon in any airport, whether your flying out of Germany or Jakarta.
Small families wrangle upset children and fend them off with juice and stern looks. Couples snuggle and glance at boarding passes. Business men wander around talking to themselves or other (invisible) business men. The flight crew walks down the hall and up to the gate area. The pilot laughs with attendants and drops his leather jacket. And nearby, an abandoned passenger sleeps on the floor awaiting an unknown departure time.
Suddenly, an extraordinarily frail and presumably old woman shuffles into sight. She carries one small bag. She is a nun in a light blue habit. I’ve never seen such a quaint sight. And I’ve never seen a German nun in an airport. I turn away for a moment, but then am nudged by my wife.
“Look at that,” she whispers.
I look and see the nun reaching into her bag.
Can you picture it? An old German nun in an airport? What does she retrieve from her bag?
The Bible.
A rosary.
Her knitting.
A book.
Or, perhaps a handkerchief.
The uncommon is just that, uncommon. And rarely does anything actually surprise me about commercial airline travel. But it definitely made us chuckle when the old, frail nun reached into her bag and retrieved a bottle of beer. She cracked it and shakily lifted it to her lips.
I don’t think there could have been anything more uncommon for us to see that day than a frail, old nun enjoying a bottle of beer before a flight.
anthony forrest
Leave a Reply