Blog

(Originally written in 2019)

It’s about 4:00 pm on a Monday. I’m standing in my kitchen contemplating my beverage of choice after a long day of meetings and errands when I hear the unfamiliar sound of a key being turned in the lock on my front door. After living alone for nearly two years, I was honestly startled before I remembered I’m expecting company. The sound must have pricked up the ears of my two cats, as they both come bounding from the bedroom, Kate (the friendly one) continuing on toward the front door, and Smokey (the antisocial demon kitty) stopping just outside the bedroom door. I’m unsure myself whether to proceed or to pretend I didn’t hear the arrival of my first Airbnb guest.

Enter D, a friendly, self-described “beach bum” scouting locations for an upcoming short film, a world traveler, and, interestingly enough, a former library director. After choosing to introduce myself first, we immediately launched a conversation about our common interests, naturally segueing from archival projects to acting to the next destinations on our travel bucket lists. Though D is the first guest I’ve hosted in my home, he’s hardly the first stranger I’ve talked to, going against everything we learned as children. And I’m not just talking to him; I’m opening my home to him with barely any knowledge about his character or habits. This is hardly uncommon, though.

For a little over a year now, I’ve been accompanying my friend Rufus (who also has a charming and very successful listing on Airbnb) to dinner with some of his guests. I’ve met cyclists from France, given an off-the-beaten-path Elvis tour to a lovely woman from Germany, and spent a memorable long weekend touring Tennessee with a Londoner. We open our homes (and sometimes our lives, but always our hearts) to these people we barely know on faith alone. And these experiences have certainly given me faith in humanity.

Though you’ve probably seen me on stage at the community theatre, I’d describe my usual demeanor as shy. Yet I seem to find friends in the faces of strangers everywhere I go. While the places I visit are often breathtaking, historic, and sometimes glamorous, it’s by far the people I meet who have the ability to change my life.

It’s a humid afternoon in the Garden District of New Orleans. My plans to make it further into the city on foot were foiled by a pop-up rain shower that found me blocks away from our shotgun Airbnb. After a little detour to freshen up, I began wandering the streets again, beneath the canopy of mossy trees and multicolored plastic beads that hang from their branches year round, not just during Mardi Gras. Finally I happen upon civilization in the form of a beachy local hangout, Samuel’s Blind Pelican. I recall that it was on my list of places to visit, though I can’t pinpoint from where the referral came. It seems like a solid choice. How can you go wrong with 25 cent oyster happy hour?!

About one beer into my evening (admittedly many more if we’re counting the whole day), two men across the bar strike up a conversation with me. I’m visiting a local hangout, after all, and I must stand out as someone who doesn’t normally join the Saturday after-work crowd. We discuss politics and religion – two topics my father told me certainly to avoid, especially in unfamiliar company. We talk about our goals and ambitions. I recommend some of my favorite business books and my new friends recommend more bars and restaurants than I can optimistically cram into the fewer than 24 hours I have left of this trip. One of the guys chats up a waitress he’s been eyeing, and we all join in a conversation about butt implants that takes a more serious turn toward how difficult it is to find your way in a new city far from home. I exchange numbers with my new friends, promising my presence later in the evening if I can manage to stay out long enough and still appear a gracious guest of the friend who organized the trip in the first place.

As I prepare to make my exit from the Blind Pelican, the bartender slides my bill across the counter, definitely missing about half the drinks I’d ordered, not to mention the shots they’d been feeding me all night. I sign, thinking to myself how I hadn’t had a jello shot in at least 8 years but it’s much like riding a bicycle; you don’t forget. Open the hatch and down it goes, in a similar fashion to the 25 cent oysters. When I take my receipt to go, I turn it over in my hand to see that he’s left me his number should I be in need of a tour guide next time I’m in town. I realize I’m a single, blonde, young-ish woman who has a penchant for talking to strangers in bars, but I’d like to think that the kindness of strangers is just that: kindness. My phone pings weeks later with a text from one of my new friends. He’s picking up the book I recommended, and he wishes me luck as I prepare for my business pitch competition.

All this reminds me of J, a biochemist who works as a Lyft driver to fulfill his social need to meet people and have engaging conversations. J and I enjoyed talking so much on the 40 minute drive from the Boston airport to my sister’s house in the suburbs that we exchanged numbers. I check in only to find that he’s taken up a new hobby, photography, and doesn’t drive Lyft as frequently as he once did. I promise to follow his photography page on Instagram and I tell him I’m planning to visit family again in the spring and hope that we might find time to meet up.

I find myself thinking about these strangers: I wish I’d asked Donna the name of her band so I could check them out next time I’m in Nashville. I wonder if Raymond ever tried standup comedy because I told him he’d be really great at it, and I truly believe that. I think about what I wouldn’t know about the world oceans away or even in my own backyard if I hadn’t decided to disobey my mother’s wishes and talk to a stranger. What great conversations I would have missed. The people I meet make the places I visit warm, and I find myself feeling like I belong in crowded airport terminals, in public libraries, coffee shops, cabs, hotel lobbies, and dive bars with 25 cent oysters. All of a sudden being a stranger doesn’t feel so strange. Isn’t it nice to belong somewhere? I hope my guests – well over 100 of them by now – have found that sense of belonging in my home.

I genuinely hated working out until I learned how muscles are built. I remember a passage from a novel I read once describing very violently and in vivid detail a physical transformation of one of the characters and how muscles must experience damage – tearing – in order to rebuild themselves stronger and bigger than before. I’m sure I learned about that in school, but reading it in an unexpected way stuck with me, and I can push through the pain at the gym when I think about it as the beginning of a process of growth.

I can take straight pain and I have a pretty high tolerance; I have several tattoos and a whole lot of other scars to show for it. It was the aching that follows that always made me rethink a heavy workout, the slight discomfort that lingers for a few days and you can’t seem escape it. Why is it that it is so awful for us to sit with the dull aches of the past? Even now, it’s hard for me to allow my body to rest, recover, and as I learned, rebuild. The aches send me back out into the street for a run, or back into the gym just to keep moving. Also, sometimes – like following the last good workout I had – once I sit down I literally can’t get back up again, so I keep moving because I think I have to. But the growth happens in that stillness. That is when we repair and rebuild.

You said I was a good writer, and that I should get a place to write down all my thoughts. Well, here it is and here they are. I will keep getting stronger. And so I sit here wondering if the aching pain in my abdomen I’m feeling right now is from the hour-long targeted workout I did yesterday, or if it is from other recently sustained bodily trauma. Either way, I hope I have a sick six-pack to show for it.