All Is Not Lost: Another World Is Possible

There is a wonderful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that tells the story of a crowd at an airport gate waiting for a delayed flight. Why don't I just post it for you.

Wandering Around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal

After learning my flight was detained four hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.
Well, one pauses these days. Gate 4A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.

“Help,” said the flight service person. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. ”

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly: “Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee?”

The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day.

I said, “No, no, we're fine. You'll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him. ”

We called her son, and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her — Southwest Airlines.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad, and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, that they had 10 shared friends.

Then I thought, just for the heck of it, Why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts, out of her bag, and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo. We were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers, nonalcoholic. And the two little girls on our flight, one African-American and one Mexican-American, ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade. And they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands — had a potted plant, some medicinal thing, poking out of her bag. With green furry leaves. Such an old-country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in, the shared world. Not a single person at this gate, once the crying of confusion stopped, had seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.