If you’ve ever read my blog, you may have noticed that many of my posts bear the label “strangers.” That means it’s a story about someone I didn’t know, but now do. It also means that they’re remarkable in some way, as people tend to be.
We’re taught to treat strangers with a certain degree of suspicion, to wonder what their intentions are. At least that’s what I’ve heard people are taught. I never learned the lesson very well.
I grew up in a pretty isolated place 22 miles from my childhood school. My innate extroversion was problematic only once I learned to make long-distance telephone calls. This was before the days of unlimited long distance and rollover minutes. This was a time when every single person in my class—save for Mike who lived another seven miles down the road—was long distance.
In the same incredulous, exasperated tone, month after month, dad would deliver the same message to me: You’ve got to talk less on the phone, you’ve simply got to! Look at this bill! What can you possibly be talking about for so long?!
I didn’t talk just by phone. When the UPS deliveryman came to the house, I talked to him, too. It’s hard to know who was more grateful for a conversation, I who had probably been playing piano alone for hours, or he who had been driving the gravel roads to leave packages on doorsteps.
After church, my parents and I would go out for lunch (which we call “dinner” in North Dakota). After we ordered our meals, they would split the sections of the Sunday paper and I would make my rounds. There were the tables of people I knew, and the tables of people I would meet. Eventually, dad would come to tell me the food had been served.
A few years ago, I was back home to attend the annual Village Fair at the town museum. Someone did a butter churning demonstration, a fiddle group from Winnipeg played, the Sons of Norway lodge served lefse, and I accompanied singers on the piano in the old saloon.
When I went to get some of the lefse, a bitty little girl wandered up to the table and pointed at the chips. “Chips,” she said in her bitty little voice. “You want chips?” I asked. She confirmed. So I bought her some chips.
It’s not something I’d do anywhere else. I saw her walk away and join her parents. They probably asked her where she got the chips, and she probably said, “A lady.”
My encounters with strangers have not been limited to my rural upbringing. Just two weeks ago I was in Lebanon for work. While in Tripoli for the week, I posted my whereabouts on Facebook. A friend immediately messaged me: Are you in Lebanon? We’re in Beirut!
The friend is part of an Armenian-Syrian family I met in Damascus in 2007. They were friends of an acquaintance, so when I called them, they came to take me out of my hotel and host me in their home, no discussion. Without so much as dropping off my luggage, the parents, daughters, and I drove around the countryside, visiting churches, laughing, and, of course, eating.
At the end of the day, with multiple strings around my wrist, each one tied by my hosts at the churches we’d visited, we reached home and had ice cream and fruit delivered for dinner. We danced in the living room to the point of happy exhaustion. I slept in the daughters’ room while one of the daughters burned me a CD of Arabic music that comes up regularly in my shuffle. The next morning, I returned to Aleppo on a train, heart at once filled with joy and nostalgia for the day we’d had.
So, you can imagine what an unexpected gift it was to see them in Beirut, to feel immediately part of their family once again. And this despite the war that’s caused them to leave the life they’ve built for decades, not knowing when they might be able to return or how. We were strangers once, but no longer.
The Armenians have a wonderful tradition of toasting. There are toasts to parents and grandparents, to children, to women, to the homeland. But I wonder if we might add a toast to the list: Antsanotneri kenats, a toast to strangers, the oft-overlooked gifts of spirit we receive each day.
The next time I have a drink in my hand, I think I’ll raise my glass to the taxi driver in Tripoli who wouldn’t accept any payment. To the half-blind man on the subway in New York City who showed me to my next train. And to the Greek-Cypriot I met on a plane en route to Moscow 15 years ago who hosted me in Cyprus last month.
These are people who savour their figurative glass and drink minchev verj (until the end/bottom’s up). These are people who’ve taught me that life is not to be sipped.
Kristi Rendahl
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Beautiful article Kristi jan:
Next time you come to Yeghhegnadzor, remind me to sing for you a French bawdy-drinking song that implies “drink minchev verj”. It goes like this: “ami(e) Kristi, ami Kristi lève ton verre et surtout ne le renverse pas. Et portes le au….
Et glou et glou….
The refrain is: Il (elle) est des nôtres, il (elle) a bu son verre comme les autres