Article January 12, 2004 Issue

Your life—forever vital

By Ann Stewart

Our plane had experienced engine trouble 20 minutes out of San Francisco, and now we were back at the airport waiting for a replacement plane. Along with a lot of other passengers, I was sitting at a phone bank calling my destination with news of the long delay. I recognized the Japanese gentleman seated next to me as a fellow passenger and asked him if he'd received a chit for dinner. "And what is a chit?" he asked. I told him that it's a voucher he could exchange for a free meal.

So I helped find a chit for him, and after our phone calls, we went off to have dinner. Although my dinner companion hadn't known what a chit was, I soon learned that he spoke fluent English and had lived in the United States off and on for many years, where he now taught at a university. We wound up having a marathon conversation about countries we'd visited, cultural differences, literature, politics, history.

After some two hours of this, my new acquaintance suddenly leaned across the table and said, "You seem to know a lot about life. I'm at the point in my life where there are, well—more years behind me than ahead of me. I've spent all this time working and caring for my family, and now I'm realizing I really don't know anything about life. Tell me, please, how you perceive life."

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