Carpe Diem

“Miss, I’m renting a car to drive home. Would you like a ride?” I look up from Chad Harbach’s "The Art of Fielding," to see a slim middle-aged woman eating cranberries. She looked exhausted.

“Back to LaGuardia? Sure!”

Lacrosse camp just ended and I had fourteen hours to catch a plane to Calgary, Canada. At two forty, as passengers were waiting on line to board, the dreaded announcement, “the three o’clock Boston-NY shuttle has been delayed. Please wait for updates,” debuted. Every half hour, this looped announcement would come back on, for the “impending storm” was still brewing in the clouds. There were no clouds.

A five hour delay morphed into my crucial flight’s cancellation, and more trips to the Hudson News store than ever previously taken. It was now nine pm.

The lady and I gathered three other New Yorkers, heaped our luggage into a rented SUV’s trunk, and escaped the sunset.

To a neighbouring car, ours didn’t fit in. Five people of four different ethnicities, and of varying ages, trekking somewhere past nightfall, - how did they all end up together? Strangers don’t travel in tandem.

But inside, the high schooler was bonding with the young Starbucks barista, the middle aged woman with the cranberries was talking about real estate with the businessman, and the driver had us aggressively playing “spot the license,” for she had pledged five dollars to the person that spied the most diversity between the plates. I won.

At one in the morning we finally pulled into the Hertz Rental Car lot. My grandpa was waiting to drive me another hour home. I went from having fourteen hours to only three left to spare, and those three were spent frantically packing for the Canadian Rockies - for another opportune adventure. As I settled on that seven AM flight the next day, I thought to myself, “maybe, just maybe, I should approach others more. They all have stories too.”