I woke after a total of 3 hours of sporadic sleep (too excited!) and headed to the SF airport to begin my 24-hour journey to Nice, France.  Ahh….vacation on the horizon.

The goal of this trip was as follows: 1. Reconnect with feeling HUMAN. 2. Relax 3. Explore 4. Take pictures 5. Have my first solo journey to a foreign land and NOT get kidnapped and sold into a French Prostitution Ring (as my father was actually worried about).

So as I cozied myself into the seat of my second flight for the day that would take me from Philadelphia to Munich, a young guy– maybe early to mid 20′s– sat next to me.  And almost immediately I got a strong sense of military.  Not that he visibly appeared as though he were in the military– he was wearing jeans and sneakers– but there was just something about him…

Anyway, I settled in and opened up the book I’d purchased for the plane ride — Julia Child’s memoir, My Life In France,– and fell completely in love with this book.  I didn’t know much about her as she was before my era of cooking show addictions, but wow… what an amazing woman.  Textured, interesting, humble, enthusiastic, passionate, and someone who wove a great amount of integrity throughout her work.  A delicious foray into France for me.

Then came dinner service for the flight which looked even more mundane than usual seeing that I’d been absorbed in a memoir about a woman’s love affair with fine, fresh French cooking, but it’s airplane food… it is what it is!  I opened up the salad and started eating when I noticed the guy next to me again:  He had such precision with his movements– the way he would unwrap butter, spread butter onto roll, eat roll.  He would uncover his chicken dish, then eat chicken.  He would unwrap dessert then eat the dessert.  When he was finished, his tray was tidy and he’d wasted nothing.

And his manners were impeccable.  He was very conscientious of his space– he was not at all sloppy with his movements, as if, along with wasting no food, he wasted no energy.  And I suppose this may make him sound robotic and I don’t mean to imply that at all.  Quite the contrary really.  He seemed so in tune with simple life, as if he were not the kid with a jumbo box of crayons who scribbled, but rather the kid with a mere 4 colors who would draw something absolutely lovely.

Then he stood up and I saw the side of his head– there was a scar about 4 inches long, looking as though it covered something rather deep.

And I melted.

I sat there very much attempting to swallow back tears– literally melting in my seat.  There was just something so human and heartbreaking about this guy… and yet, we hadn’t spoken many words to one another outside of pleasantries of “please” and “thank you.”

Any residual feelings of work/life stress disappeared in my 9-hour long journey to Germany.  Sitting next to this guy, I felt so silently connected to simple humanity and purely humbled.  I’m sure he had no idea what me and my admittedly sensitive, crazy self was feeling, but what a gift this guy was.  It’s amazing how one person can effect another in so many ways… and most likely never even know it.

So between Julia Child’s memoir and sitting next to a German soldier (I spotted his army bag on our way off the plane), day 1 of my trip saw the reaching of goal #1: Reconnect with feeling Human.  And I reconnected whole-heartedly (and managed to not actually break down crying!) to being a human with my little metaphysical box of 4 crayons.

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