“One of the great things 
about travel is that you 
find out how many good, 
kind people there are.”  
Edith Wharton

I’m sort of an extrovert. Well, to be more accurate, I can be an off-the-chart extrovert in some situations. I am energized by meeting people. For some strange reason, I am quite comfortable striking up a conversation with just about anyone I meet in any situation.

I subscribe to the philosophy exemplified by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, who said, “There are no strangers in this world, only friends I haven’t met yet.”

On my many walks through San Francisco, I constantly meet people and engage them in conversation. Sometimes, when I see people trying to take selfies, I offer to take the photo for them, or perhaps it’s a family or couple photo, which allows everyone to be in the picture. At other times, I offer help to tourists who appear to be confused studying a map of The City. I always ask where they are from, which often leads to lively conversations about mutual friends and experiences.

On Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in Nassau International Airport awaiting the first leg of my journey home — Nassau to Atlanta. A young couple with two small children, a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl, were sitting close by. The little girl was quite a flirt. She would smile at me, so I would smile back. I ended up talking with the parents. They were heading back home after a weeklong vacation. The man asked where I was from. I mentioned that I had grown up in San Francisco, but that I’ve lived in San José for most of the past 50 years. 

The man said he grew up in Daly City. Click! “So where’d you go to school?” I inquired. He said he went to Saint Ignatius. I smiled and told him that I’d graduated from SI, too, in 1972. He was class of 2007. Since he said he was from Daly City originally, I also asked where he attended elementary school. He said he had graduated from Our Lady of Mercy School, the same school my good friend Dan Pasini had attended, and the school where, during my senior year at SI, I taught a CCD class (after-school religious education for public school students) to a group of “incorrigible sixth-grade boys.” That’s the phrase used by the Director of Religious Education at OLM when she called to ask if I would teach the class. It turned out to be a great experience.

Then I inquired as to where they live now. He told me they live in one of the many suburbs of Chicago. I mentioned that Kathy has family in many of the suburbs — Orland Park, Brookfield, and Lisle. The man’s wife chirped-in, “We live in Lisle!” Yes, this is a very small world.

While some may think it is strange for me to be so outgoing and conversational with total strangers, it is something with which I am quite comfortable, and something I will continue to do. As the poet Maya Angelou once said, “A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.”