I almost didn’t sit next to her.
Gate seven at Denver International Airport on a Tuesday afternoon in February is not the kind of place where you expect your life to shift direction. It is fluorescent and crowded and smells faintly of fast food and the specific anxiety of delayed flights. I had been traveling for work for three years by then — not the glamorous kind of travel, just the kind where you spend a lot of time in exactly this sort of terminal, eating something forgettable out of a paper bag and checking your phone for updates that don’t come.
The gate area was nearly full. The only open seat I could find without squeezing past a row of people was next to an elderly woman sitting very straight with a large handbag on her lap and a small rolling suitcase at her feet. She was perhaps seventy-five, maybe older. White hair pinned back with a precision that suggested habit rather than vanity. Sensible shoes. A wool coat in a shade of blue that I thought of later as the specific blue of winter light through a window.
I asked if the seat was taken. She said no and moved her coat to make room with a briskness that managed to be both welcoming and efficient at the same time. I sat down. I opened my laptop. I intended to spend the next hour working.
I did not work for a single minute of that hour.
She spoke first. Not intrusively — she had the manner of someone who understood the difference between conversation and imposition and who had decided, after whatever internal calculation she conducted, that a conversation was warranted. She asked where I was headed. I told her. She told me she was going to visit her daughter in Portland, a trip she made twice a year and which she described as essential in the tone of someone describing a medical requirement — not warmly, exactly, but with a kind of settled certainty about what her life required of her.
Her name was Miriam. She had been a high school history teacher for thirty-four years in a small town in Colorado that I had driven through once without stopping. She had retired six years earlier and spent the intervening time, she told me, learning to inhabit retirement — a process she described as considerably more difficult than she had anticipated and considerably more interesting than she had feared.
“Most people think retirement is the end of the story,” she said. “It isn’t. It’s just a different chapter with a different set of problems.”
I asked what kinds of problems.
“The problem of deciding what you are when you are no longer what you did. The problem of time, which you suddenly have too much of and which turns out to require as much skill to manage as any job. The problem of staying curious when the structures that organized your curiosity are gone.” She paused. “Although I have found that curiosity, if you’ve kept it alive long enough, tends to find its own structures eventually.”
I looked at her. “How did you keep it alive?”
“By staying interested in things that had nothing to do with me. And by talking to strangers on airplanes.”
— Miriam
She said it with a dry amusement that made me laugh, and then she looked at me with the particular attention of someone who has spent thirty-four years reading rooms full of young people and who does not waste that skill in retirement.
“What are you running from?” she asked.
It was so direct that for a moment I couldn’t find the beginning of a response. I was not accustomed to being asked direct questions by strangers in airports, and I was particularly not accustomed to being asked questions that cut to something I had been carefully not looking at for what turned out, when I actually examined it, to be quite some time.
“I’m not running from anything,” I said. “I’m traveling for work.”
She nodded, in the way of someone who has heard an answer and also heard what it is not saying.
“Of course,” she said pleasantly, and looked forward at the gate. And then, after a moment: “How long have you been traveling for work?”
“Three years.”
“Every week?”
“Most weeks.”
“And before that?”
I told her. A different job in the same city. Before that, graduate school. Before that, a city I had moved away from in a hurry after a relationship ended badly — not dramatically badly, just the ordinary kind of badly that leaves you in a place that holds too many associations and not enough reasons to stay.
I had not intended to tell her any of that. It came out in the manner of things that have been waiting to be said to someone who seems equipped to receive them.
Miriam listened without interrupting, which was the quality I noticed most — the specific patience of someone who has learned that the most useful thing you can do while another person is speaking is simply continue to listen.
When I finished, she said, “So three years of movement. What are you moving toward?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again because I did not have an answer and discovering that I did not have an answer was more unsettling than I expected.
❖ ❖ ❖
We talked for the full hour before boarding. I am going to try to describe what that conversation was like without making it sound more than it was — it was not a revelation or a transformation, it was not a movie scene where wisdom is delivered in quotable sentences and the music swells underneath. It was just a conversation with a seventy-something retired history teacher in a Denver airport who asked questions I had not been asked and who waited, without impatience, while I tried to find the answers.
She asked what I had wanted to do when I was young — not as a career, but what I had wanted to do, the thing I had imagined for myself when imagining still felt unconstrained. I told her. It was something I had not said out loud in years and it sounded strange in my mouth, the way things sound when they have been kept private for long enough that speaking them feels like a slight violation of something.
She did not tell me to pursue it. She did not offer advice about how. She simply said, “That sounds like it mattered.”
“It did,” I said. “It does. I just — I’m not sure how to get back to it from where I am.”
“You don’t get back to it. You get forward to it. Back doesn’t exist. You are different now than you were then, and what you make of that thing now will be different too, and that’s not a loss. That’s just time doing what time does.”
— Miriam
I sat with that for a moment.
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” I said, which was the true thing underneath all the other things I had been saying, the one I had not meant to arrive at in a Denver airport on a Tuesday afternoon talking to a woman I had met forty minutes earlier.
Miriam looked at me with the patience of someone who has heard many versions of this fear from many people across many years.
“How old are you?”
— Miriam
“Thirty-four.”
She looked at me for a moment in a way that managed to be simultaneously kind and slightly withering.
“I started learning Portuguese at sixty-eight. I am currently mediocre at it, which is an improvement from terrible, and I expect to be adequate by the time I’m eighty. Thirty-four is not late. Thirty-four is barely started.”
— Miriam
I laughed. She smiled, the smile of someone who has made the point they intended to make and is satisfied with how it landed.
“The fear of being too late,” she said, more gently, “is almost always the fear of something else. Of failing. Of having tried and been wrong about yourself. Of discovering that the thing you wanted was not what you imagined. Those are real fears and they deserve to be named. But they are not the same as being too late.”
The gate agent announced boarding. We both looked up.
Miriam began gathering her things with the same efficient briskness she had used to make room for me an hour earlier. I closed my laptop, which I had never opened, and sat for a moment in the particular stillness of having been seen by someone I had not expected to be seen by.
“Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t expect — this was not how I expected to spend this hour.”
She stood, her handbag over her arm, her coat folded over one hand.
“That’s the thing about strangers. They have no investment in the version of you that you’ve been performing. They just meet who you actually are.”
— Miriam
She joined the boarding queue. I watched her go, upright in her blue wool coat, rolling her small suitcase behind her with the self-possession of someone who has been traveling long enough to know exactly what she is doing and where she is going.
We were on different flights. I did not get her last name. I did not ask for a way to contact her, which in the moment felt right and in retrospect I have occasionally wished I had done differently. But I also think that the completeness of the conversation depended partly on its containment — on the fact that it existed only in that hour, in that airport, and then closed, the way certain conversations close when the circumstances that made them possible are themselves complete.
❖ ❖ ❖
That was four years ago. I am thirty-eight now. I am still traveling for work, though less — I negotiated a change in my role eighteen months ago that reduced the travel significantly, in part because I had decided that the movement was no longer serving the purpose I had originally assigned it and that it was time to stop assigning purposes to things that were actually just habits.
I started doing the thing I had told Miriam I had wanted to do — not dramatically, not all at once, not by quitting anything or making large announcements. Just by beginning, in the hours I had, in the form that was available to me now rather than the form I had imagined for myself at twenty-two. It is different from what I imagined. It is also more mine, in the way that things are more yours when you arrive at them from who you actually are rather than who you thought you would become.
I am not sure I would have started without that hour. Not because Miriam told me to — she didn’t. But because being asked what I was moving toward, and not having an answer, had been uncomfortable enough that I had eventually decided to find one.
I think about her sometimes, in airports. I look for women in blue wool coats, which is not a reasonable search strategy and has not produced results. But I think about the question she asked — not the Portuguese one, not the too-late one — but the first one. The one she asked after I told her I wasn’t running from anything.
She had just nodded and looked forward and let the silence do what silence does when it has been given enough room. And then she had asked how long I had been traveling for work. And the rest had followed, the way things follow when someone asks the right question and waits long enough for the honest answer to arrive.
I have been trying to learn to ask questions like that. The kind that do not presume the answer. The kind that leave room. The kind that a retired history teacher asks a stranger at gate seven on a Tuesday afternoon in February because she has decided, after thirty-four years of paying attention to people, that this particular stranger might benefit from being asked.
She was right. I did.
❖ ❖ ❖
Advice
If you are moving through your life at a pace that does not leave room to ask yourself what you are moving toward — please slow down long enough to ask it. Not as a crisis or a reckoning, just as a question that deserves an honest answer. The fear of being too late is almost always the fear of something else. Of failing. Of discovering that the thing you wanted is not what you imagined. Those are real fears and they deserve to be named — but naming them is not the same as being governed by them. You are not too late. You are different than you were, and what you make of the things you want now will be different too, and that is not a loss. And if a stranger in an airport asks you a question that cuts closer than you expected — consider answering honestly. They have no investment in the version of you that you have been performing. That is a rarer gift than it sounds.
If This Story Moved You
Miriam started learning Portuguese at sixty-eight. She is currently mediocre at it. She expects to be adequate by the time she is eighty. She said this to a thirty-four-year-old who was afraid it was too late, and the thirty-four-year-old laughed, and the laugh was the thing that opened the door. That is the whole architecture of this conversation — a question, a silence, an honest answer that arrived somewhere the speaker had not intended to go, and then the specific kindness of someone who listened without investment in any particular outcome. Strangers can do this in ways that people who know us cannot, because they have not agreed to the version of us we present to the people who are watching. They just meet who we actually are. The narrator did not get Miriam’s last name. They still look for blue wool coats in airports. And four years later they started doing the thing they had told a stranger they had wanted to do, not because they were told to but because being asked what they were moving toward and having no answer had been uncomfortable enough to eventually produce one. That is not a dramatic transformation. It is just a question, asked at gate seven, that turned out to be the right one at the right time. Those things happen more often than we think. We just have to be willing to close the laptop.
