Permission
“Headed home or heading out?” he asked.
His name was Robert, and I learned this about halfway through the flight, after we had talked for an hour about nothing in particular and then about something more particular, the way you talk to strangers on long flights when the context of your ordinary life is suspended and you are not quite yet the person who will arrive at the other end.
He was seventy one years old, a retired civil engineer from Portland, traveling to visit his daughter who was living in Munich with her family. His wife had died four years ago. He had not traveled much since, and his daughter had asked him to come for Christmas, and he had said yes, and here he was.
“And you?” he said.
I told him about the tour. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, twelve days.
“Alone?” he said.
“Alone,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Good for you,” he said. Not condescendingly. Genuinely. The way someone says it when they mean it.
“It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this since my husband died,” I said.
“How long?”
“Eight years,” I said.
He nodded.
“Mine was four,” he said. “It took me three years to leave the house for anything except groceries.”
“I didn’t leave my town for anything except groceries,” I said.
“Why did you finally?”
I thought about Hannah’s voice on the phone, polite and warm-less, and the quiet house with the decorations I had put up for people who were not coming.
“I was told to stay home,” I said.
He looked at me.
“By someone who should have known better?”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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