Lessons from a Man at the Airport

I had a free day today. Since I finished my work at the Crisis Center, I didn't have anything to do. I ate lunch, then I told my friend Cody to put on a jacket because we were taking a trip.

We hopped in my car and headed down the road to Tri-Cities Airport. I checked the flight schedule before we left to make sure we would have a few planes to watch. Since Tri-Cities is so small, flights are few and far between.

A rainy, windy day doesn't make for a good day for plane watching. But, I'll take any type of weather so long as I get to see some planes take off and land. When we got to the airport, Cody headed towards the bathroom and I went up to the observation deck. There was a man standing on the deck who looked to be in his 60s and he struck up a conversation with me. "It's been 15 years since I've been to this airport. It's really built up!" "It sure has," I said, excited that someone wanted to talk about the airport with me.

I asked him if he had come, like myself, just to watch a few planes take off and land. "My daughter has a friend who is coming home for the holidays from Iraq today. His parents don't know he is coming, so I am picking him up so we can drop him off and suprise them." I thought this was cool. I almost teared up when he told me the story because for some reason, I imagined in my mind some worried parents who hadn't spoken to their son in days, and the joy that will be coming into their lives in just a few minutes when he arrives by suprise at their house. I just can't imagine.

We continued the conversation and the man told me about his work in the armed forces. He was drafted into the Korean War where he was wounded, and he later served again in the Vietnam War. He met his wife when she was only 14, and he won a bet against his brother saying that the relationship wouldn't last. They've now been married for nearly 40 years. He had an alcohol problem. When he was in Vietnam, one of his friends who was a pilot took him up in a plane one day. "I thought it was amazing," he said. "I came back to the United States and needed a hobby, so I started to take pilot lessons. My instructor knew I drank a little. He always told me, '24 hours from bottle to throttle.' I came to the airport one day to take my lesson, and he smelled whiskey on me from the night before. He told me I couldn't fly that day. I never went back to the airport after that."

It was at this point I started telling him about my dream of becoming a pilot and how I knew it was gonna make me happy. "Young man," he said, "you gotta do what makes you happy. You don't need to do something in life that you don't like."

I was sitting at the airport, watching airplanes, and I was talking to a man who was giving me lessons on life. It was a bittersweet moment. For some reason, this man has stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. Had me and Cody not gone to the airport today, I wouldn't have met him.
I learned a few things from this...how alcohol had ruined something he enjoyed, how I needed to pursue my dream, and how it is important to strike up important conversations with people in public. After all, you never know what you will learn from a perfect stranger.

Until next time, Zach will leave it at that.