The Empty Seat

One empty seat on the Lufthansa Boston-Frankfurt and I was lucky enough to be next to it. The Indian woman next to me and I exchanged smiles and congratulated ourselves on our good luck as we waited for the luggage of the missing person to be removed.

The plane took off, the seat belt sign was turned off and a tall German woman stood next to me asking if the seat was vacant. She said her seat mate was ...and she rolled her eyes. The Indian woman and her friend and I agreed.

Curious as always, I asked where she was from. “

“A little town near Stuttgart,” she said.

“I lived in Stuttgart for two years and loved it,” I said.

This led to a discussion of our lives that went deeper. The two Indian women joined in.

A small head up popped up in the row in front of us. We started playing with three-year old Victoria, taking turns taking her dolly, flipping the head cover back and forth and playing finger games.

The plane began to bounce then drop and rise, drop and rise. The crew was told to take their seats. The Indian woman started to cry with fear. She said that they had a terrible flight and only later did they realize that they were flying over the tsunami. The German woman held one hand, her Indian friend the other, while I tried to quench my own fear by reassuring her.

When the plane calmed, and the woman who had been afraid walked to the front of the plane to talk with a co-worker also on board, the other Indian woman moved and we discovered she was in pain. The German woman grabbed a pillow and put it on her lap. “Lay down,” she said. The woman did.

We talked about the poor, how lucky we are to be living the lives we live, which we were sure were better than 99% of the people who’ve ever lived in this world. We talked about work, families, hobbies. We laughed, we cried.

The flight ended much too fast (except for the turbulence that went on much too long). I went on to catch my Paris flight, the Indians looked for a place to spend the hours before the next leg of a journey that would last at least 30 hours and the German woman took off for her Stuttgart connection.

We’ll never see each other again, but for a few hours there was an intense friendship of four women despite being of three nationalities, three religions, and speakers of five different languages with thirty years difference in ages. The differences were not important. The similarities were.