Here Come the Coackroaches

This week we invaded our friend Melissa in San Antonio. I'm sure it felt a little bit like being overrun by cockroaches. Melissa's husband was away for work so she was outnumbered 4 to 1. Our sheer volume is magnified exponentially as well so we probably sounded not 4 times as loud but 256 times as loud. Melissa is neat and no matter how hard I try to be neat, messes just create themselves around me. The same goes for my son, except worse. Plus my teenage son now eats constantly- and Melissa had snacks so he was doing his best impression of vermin and getting into her food non stop. So the fact that Melissa stayed good natured, laughing and pleasant the 3 days we were there was quite amazing to me. She actually said she enjoyed our visit, which I hesitantly believe because she's not inclined to lie just to make me feel better. Which leads me to my topic. Everyone should travel a little bit by the seat of their pants because it connects us with other human beings in ways that nothing else can.
It's humbling to invade someone else's house. It points out some real character flaws that you may not notice when you're at your own house. Our loudness, our lack of neatness and our constant consumption of food were the three most obvious in this particular trip. But it was also really cool to see that someone would take time off from work, pick us up from the airport in two separate trips, one after midnight, show us the town all day, feed us, let us play her video games and movies and take us back to the airport, all in the name of friendship. It's nice to have a friend willing to do all that- and still like us when the trip is over.
Traveling- this kind of traveling, not the "everything is worked out perfectly and there is no room for error" kind of traveling- increases my faith in humanity and my feelings of connectedness to the rest of the world. We've had countless people offer us directions, recommend great places to eat, help us find the right stop on the metro, and show tremendous kindness to our kids. One of my favorite memories is when an older Austrian gentleman complemented my son, calling him a gut man kinder (good young man), on the bus. It also increases the debt I feel to the rest of society. Seeing the kindness of others makes me want to be kinder too.
My husband tops the list in my book for kindness to strangers. I married up. Let me share a story that happened quite a few years ago. We were traveling on the freeway in San Diego and walking along the freeway was an older woman dragging a large suitcase. My husband stopped to see if her car had broken down or if he could be of assistance in some way. This woman, probably in her late 60s, had seen baby Shamu on TV and decided to come out to see him. She was able to afford the bus ride out and the ticket to Sea World but realized that she didn't have enough money to make it home- to Arkansas. She was going to walk all the way home. We were newly weds ourselves and didn't have much money, but my husband called his friend and together they got enough money together to get her a bus ticket back home. They got her to the bus station, bought her ticket and made sure she was safely on the bus. I guess that one incident alone earned them a lot of good karma points. We are still the recipient of that good karma, every time we travel.
And that is why I recommend that everyone travel. It makes for a small world where we realize that the little things that we do for other people really make a difference in the big picture, that we are all indebted to one another for our well being, and that we are really much more alike that we realize.
Thanks Melissa, for teaching me those lessons yet again.