Sam

His name is Sam, he's a young man from the north of England (near James Herriot's home), and our lives intersected for exactly forty-five minutes on Monday.

He didn't even look up when I climbed over him into the window seat for the flight to Greenville, and since he was reading a book with a vulgar word in the title, I didn't figure he'd give me the time of day. After a couple of words of small talk, I discovered that that was a big misconception. He was eager to talk. His British accent was so strong that I had to listen very closely to understand what he was saying - it was much stronger than the average English person I've ever met or talked with. (Think Malcolm Merriwether the butler in the old Andy Griffith shows.) Perhaps a heavier accent is true of the people from the northern dales.

He told me he calls his mother "Big Sue," and we laughed about that because Mike always called his grandmother "Big Trudy." It was funny until Sam later told me his mother's age. She is a year younger than I am.

I don't even remember how we got talking about it, but he told me that though he grew up in the Church of England, now he was agnostic. It was very easy to suggest to him that he read the Gospel of John and the epistle of I John before he decides that there is no God. And then, after it had escaped me at first, I remembered the name of a pastor in the town where he lives, whose wife I used to teach with years ago. So I wrote it down, along with the two books of the Bible. He accepted the slip of paper, seemingly gratefully.

Then. as we deplaned, he said in his English brogue, "I really enjoyed talking with you. I like to meet people and find out about them." And he was gone.

I was glad for my forty-five minutes of interaction with Sam.